Agent Teams vs Dedicated Concurrency - Orchestration or Tmux Sessions
The agent teams discussion usually focuses on coordination frameworks - which orchestrator, what message format, how to share context. But the real question is simpler: does your work decompose cleanly? If it does, five tmux sessions beat a sophisticated orchestration layer every time.
The Decomposition Problem
Agent teams only outperform parallel independent agents when tasks have genuine dependencies. If Agent A needs output from Agent B before it can proceed, you need coordination. If they can work independently, coordination is pure overhead.
Most software work decomposes cleanly at the feature or file level. "Build the API," "build the frontend," "write the tests" - these are independent tasks that happen to contribute to the same project. No orchestrator needed. Just assign and go.
The Tmux Approach
Open a terminal, create five tmux panes, start a Claude Code session in each one, give each a clear task, and let them run. Monitor progress by glancing at each pane. This is not fancy, but it works remarkably well for 5-6 concurrent tasks.
The advantages are practical:
- Zero setup cost - no framework to install or configure
- Full visibility - you can see exactly what each agent is doing
- Easy intervention - type into any pane to redirect an agent
- No coordination bugs - because there is no coordination layer to be buggy
When Orchestration Wins
Orchestration makes sense for recurring, well-defined pipelines. If you run the same multi-step workflow daily - CI/CD, data processing, content publishing - the upfront investment in coordination pays off through reliability and repeatability.
For ad-hoc development work, manual concurrency via tmux sessions is faster to set up and easier to debug when things go wrong.
Fazm supports both patterns - you can run parallel sessions independently or chain them through MCP tool coordination.
This post was inspired by a discussion on r/ClaudeCode by u/Accomplished-Emu8030.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.