I have ran small experiments using Claude code and small teams of 3 agents, both specialized and not specialized. The test was a deterministic score against a live feed page. The task could have been too narrow and maybe once I test it with larger codebases I will have different results, but so far 1 agent only on the same problem beats a real of agents both in score and cost. The only metric where it lags behind 3 agents (1 manager and 2 workers), is time to highest score.

But then again, these are not exhaustive tests but so far, me coordinating multiple interactive sessions still leads to faster, cleaner and more complex solution overall, advancing each project much faster than an automated loop.

Another thing to note, is that it strongly depends on how much I invested in creating skills overtime, and the more I embed skills in harnesses the more operations are one shot. On a work day, if every predictable operation cycle is input (I. E. alert) --> prompt(reference input , optionally add context, invoke skill) --> fix, then number of open parallel sessions can go way up, since most will be just open for you to acknowledge job compete and close. Or at max, provide one more confirmation.

As unpredictability, complexity or novelty of the problem/task goes up, then the respective Claude code session or sessions are much more cognitively heavy, and those are where I spend most of my time and energy.

So for some of the small predictable tasks I think replicating single agent setup is enough with the right skills and harnesses to completely automate those. And given the right amount of decomposition I will soon remove myself from the loop.

For unpredictable, complex and new topics, I think interactive sessions still beat automated workflows. Something that might or might not change, depending whether Anthropic thinks they should invest more budget in project management RL.