←back to thread

How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

(zachwills.net)
280 points zachwills | 1 comments | 09 Sep 25 13:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
skimojoe ◴[13 Sep 25 11:20 UTC] No.45231193[source]▶
I am sceptical if these persona based agents really make that much of a difference, and more "appear" to make a difference because of their talk style.

Underneath is just a system prompt, or more likely a prompt layered on top "You are a frontend engineer, competent in react and Next.js, tailwind-css" - the stack details and project layout, key information is already in the CLAUDE.md. For more stuff the model is going to call file-read tools etc.

I think its more theatre then utilty.

What I have taken to doing is having a parent folder and then frontend/ backend/ infra/ etc as children.

parent/CLAUDE.md frontend/CLAUDE.md backend/CLAUDE.md

The parent/CLAUDE.md provides a highlevel view of the stack "FastAPI backend with postgres, Next.js frontend using with tailwind, etc". The parent/CLAUDE.md also points to the childrens CLAUDE.md's which have more granular information.

I then just spawn a claude in the parent folder, set up plan mode, go back and forth on a design and then have it dump out to markdown to RFC/ and after that go to work. I find it does really well then as all changes it makes are made with a context of the other service.

replies(7): >>45231217 #>>45233133 #>>45234479 #>>45235090 #>>45237422 #>>45237827 #>>45238553 #
1. chickensong ◴[13 Sep 25 19:04 UTC] No.45234479[source]▶
I too am skeptical about the personas, but I still use them to organize context and instructions for different types of work. I use a top-level .agents dir, with commands, roles, and rules, sub-dirs.

CLAUDE.md is kept somewhat lean, with pointers to individual files in ./docs/ and .claude/commands is a symlink to .agents/commands.

After starting Claude, I use /commands to load a role and context, which pulls in only the necessary docs and avoids, say, loading UI design or test architecture docs, when adding a backend feature.

I don't want to have to do any of this, but it helps me try and keep the agents on the rails and minimize context rot.