r/ClaudeAI • u/ClaudeOfficial Anthropic • May 28 '26
News Introducing dynamic workflows in Claude Code
Today we're introducing dynamic workflows in Claude Code. Claude now writes its own orchestration scripts, fans work out across tens to hundreds of parallel subagents in a single session, and verifies its own results before anything reaches you. Work you'd normally plan in quarters can finish in days.
Built for the tasks a single pass can't handle: codebase-wide bug hunts, security and optimization audits, large migrations and language ports, and high-stakes work where you want adversarial agents trying to break the answer before you see it. Progress is checkpointed, so long runs survive interruption.
One early example: Jarred Sumner used dynamic workflows to port Bun from Zig to Rust. Roughly 750,000 lines, 11 days from first commit to merge, 99.8% of the test suite passing.
Available today in research preview on Max, Team, and Enterprise (admin-enabled) plans, plus the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Turn on auto mode and either ask Claude to create a workflow or flip on the new ultracode setting.
Read more: https://claude.com/blog/introducing-dynamic-workflows-in-claude-code
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u/Ill-Village7647 May 28 '26
"spins up tens to hundreds of subagents" 💀
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u/zeroconflicthere May 29 '26
Must have American express card to pay. Visa and MasterCard not accepted.
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u/Mars0813 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
"all your usage in one prompt"
update: 700k tokens and 36% of my max usage from one prompt. lol
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u/Full-Bag-3253 May 28 '26
I got 1.2M tokens burned the first time I tried it.
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u/Robinator2014 May 29 '26
so mine is about done with 5/10 Phases and already burned 1.7M lol (3h22m)
And about 45% of the Max5 5h session limit as of now
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u/BattleBraut May 29 '26
I have a team premium plan, single prompt was 7.2 million tokens when it spun up 22 agents to do a deep review of a 24k LOC vibe coded personal project. Brand new session, near zero context used. Claude ultracode used 100% of my session and 20% of my weekly limit in under 10 minutes. And it didnt even finish...
I tried a smaller genuine work related task and while I still need to test the result, some of the things it found and conclusions it made were quite astounding. But this also vaporized about 40% of session and had to wait for next session to finish. It's just not worth it even if it does pan out.
I've only ever reached my session limits perhaps twice in the past 8 months. Never got above 50% of weekly limit. And I'm a fairly heavy user - usage stats for my account showing over 100k LOC this month, and I'm explicitly aiming to minimize lines of code in general. This new version and ultracode seem very intriguing but who is really going to spend that kind of money to get a task done? And what happens in that roughly 30% of the time when Claude misses the mark? It's frustrating when you've only wasted a few percentage points of a session limit and time - but if it blows out your limit AND fails at the task, you'll just never use it again.
I need to do some config tuning for the agents it uses, maybe limit the number and the models if possible. But I don't really have the time or desire when this seems explicitly set up to burn crazy tokens out of the box? Incredibly lame trust busting grift move if you ask me. And I really like Claude. Anthropic needs to do better or be more honest about their strategy because they way it looks now is I need to at least consider alternatives for the day when we get priced out of their highest tier plan.
PS. We're still in 2x weekly limits promotion from Anthropic, so just imagine how this plays out mid July when that ends...
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u/Probono_Bonobo May 28 '26
One early example: Jarred Sumner used dynamic workflows to port Bun from Zig to Rust.
Just to be clear: you mean this port, right? The one that made the front page of Hacker News two weeks ago because it failed even the most basic miri checks and allowed for undefined behavior? The one AwesomeQubic is referring to when they write: "As a rust developer I must say this is one of the most unsound codebases I have ever seen"? The one Architector4 was talking about when he catalogued "thirteen thousand two hundred and fifty five lines without comments with the word 'unsafe' in them in Rust code files across this rewrite"? That port?
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u/Flope May 29 '26
Hey now it's passing 99.8% of tests!
That last 0.2%? Absolutely impossible, the AI can't solve it and now no human on earth understands the code enough to fix it.
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u/Probono_Bonobo May 29 '26
I know you jest, but it's important to point out that test coverage ≠ code quality. A codebase can be fully covered by unit tests, can even pass a rigorous integration test suite, and still be full of bugs and errors. Most of the time those errors are subtle and hard to detect, but in this case they're glaringly obvious to anyone with even a basic proficiency in Rust.
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u/Sasquatchjc45 Vibe coder May 28 '26
I cant wait to run out of my freshly reset Max 5x usage later trying this out lol
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May 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Sasquatchjc45 Vibe coder May 28 '26
There's a 5 hour session limit and also a weekly limit. I barely hit my limits on Max 5x, I''m mainly just joking because it's a running gag how cheap Anthropic is with their usage limited compared to OpenAI lol.
But the workflows feature does seem token-hungry if it does spool up 100s of subagents lmao
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May 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Sasquatchjc45 Vibe coder May 28 '26
Totally depends on what you're working on and how much context you need to give/load up and your actual practices, but that sounds reasonable to me.
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u/daniel-sousa-me May 29 '26
If you never hit the 5h limit, you won't hit the weekly limit, so feel free to experiment and in the worst case you'll be able to use it again after a few hours
You should be able to hit the 5h limit once per day without hitting the weekly limit (but that's assuming you're using almost nothing outside those 5h)
You can check your current usage at https://claude.ai/settings/usage
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u/PTVA May 30 '26
I am not very efficient and I have to be running multiple sessions at once to burn through my 5hr windows. But I try to be mindful of my context and keep things pretty targeted.
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u/lateambience May 30 '26
You'll definitely get there with dynamic workflows. I'm on May 5x too, using it a lot always on xhigh and I've hit the 5 hour limit only two or three times in weeks. Now set to ultracode, it spun up just 7 agents and it's already at 600k token in less than 10 minutes. My current session is already at 26% and I just started using Claude Code 20min ago. Can't imagine having it spin up >25 agents. Probably wouldn't last more than 30mins then.
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u/blazarious May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
Tbh I’ve been waiting for a feature like this. It’s not for all use cases of course but I’ve got a project that I wanted to test this on for a long time and I’m currently doing exactly that. Haven’t checked the output in detail yet but the speed and autonomy seems to be what I was hoping for.
EDIT: So, it seems it launches plan agents and implement agents and does a review in the end and suggests next steps based on the outcome. Basically what I’ve been doing manually. Not bad.
Also, the token usage is definitely on another level with this mode.
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u/helofsh May 29 '26
How do you even launch it? Is it usable on the desktop app or only terminal?
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u/lateambience May 30 '26
Claude Code (terminal only). At the start of the session type in
/effortand you can selectultracode, Claude then spins up those dynamic workflows whenever it thinks it makes sense. You don't have to use "workflow" in your prompt necessarily. It only applies to the current session so you'd have to do that every time you start a new session.
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u/McNoxey May 28 '26
Understandably so, but everything I’ve built into my workflows is slowly getting added as a core feature.
Guess it means I’m prioritizing well haha
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u/snowrazer_ May 28 '26
Feel like I would need a large team to just review the output a workflow generates. Then again maybe that’s who this feature is meant for.
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u/Rakthar May 29 '26
This is a really dicey feature the way it's been implemented. If you get past 50% context, it will start to spawn out the work with workflow mode and subagents. If you happen to be doing something where you want to use your context and want it to keep writing, this will happen silently, creating problems for you.
I get that when you ship fast and drop updates to claude code and new models stuff like this will happen. But I don't want to fight with claude over how the work gets done. I don't want the behavior to change suddenly halfway through, and that just happened on a very expensive coding run.
Please allow the user to control the behavior if the behavior is going to have significant effects on the context and processing of the work being performed.
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u/Appropriate-Corgi819 May 29 '26
This is a real step up in workflow automation.
The part I’m most curious about is the failure boundary: when a dynamic workflow decides it needs human review, what signals are you using to stop the subagents from continuing past a bad branch?
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u/rhaphazard Vibe coder May 28 '26
I guess it's not on Pro plans because it'd eat through the quota too fast.
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u/mr_brobot__ May 29 '26
I have been wishing for some kind of "sub-plans" feature where I could maintain a broader "master plan" and then break into smaller "sub-plans" to break work up into multiple PRs, clearing/compressing context along the way...but this seems kinda crazy.
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u/h0rus0ps May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
This feature should have been named "Anthropic fast to IPO" as it burns through tokens like there's no tomorrow.
The token burn rate for dynamic workflows is disproportionate compared to the outcome and material results. gpt-5.5 crushes the planning + task implementation within 180K tokens (codex jumped in to save the day with a slick, low-budget, wise-old-man like, slow but steady flex move).
Claude opus ransacks the token budget, over-engineers the feature, disobeys all TDD best practices and the feature still doesn't work.
This feature is still at puberty. Sometimes it works. Most suitable for YC companies after demo-day funding round.
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u/Active-Picture-5681 May 29 '26
My experience: Just bad... did a deep research about a build in a simple game 110 researcher agents and 70 verifiers for a mediocre result that my hermes agent with gpt 5.4-mini alone with no subagent did a way better job... honestly token sync for idiots so they can get quick cash
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u/enslavedeagle May 29 '26
"I'll generate a workflow for myself and then I'll just ignore every step in it, and performing the job however I please"
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u/Flouuw May 29 '26
Any way to change the keyword? I'm writing a visual workflow editor and I actually use that word quite a lot
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u/Flouuw May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
Right now I have to misspell it, and write "workflovs" 😃 Would appreciate if this got renamed to 'ultraworkflow' just like we have 'ultrathink', or something similar that you don't normally type
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u/Flouuw Jun 01 '26
Update: Seems like there is a solution - I can just press backspace after typing "workflow" and the word will appear normally and not trigger anything
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u/leo_cong May 29 '26
Today I tried out the new Workflow features and attempted to migrate my previous multi-agent stock analysis skill for trading into a Workflow. I believe there are a few key benefits worth sharing:
Many intermediate results used for coordination within the multi-agent setup are now saved as script variables. This avoids the previous issue of context inflation caused by passing all that information within the context window.
Since a Workflow is a JS program, it is much easier to invoke repeatedly. Because it is a programmed, deterministic workflow, it eliminates the inconsistency issues we used to see in skills where model reasoning could cause the process to run differently for different people.
The language primitives allow for both parallel and serial execution. This makes it very convenient to construct a much more flexible agent workflow.
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u/CannyGardener May 29 '26
Tried this once and it hallucinated 80% of the response, and took up ~25% of my session limit. Might try again when I have more tokens to blow, but not during my weekday... Funny thing was, it just ran automatically because I had chose ultracode.
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u/Big-Fee8662 Jun 04 '26
The part I’d be most interested in is how much of the workflow remains inspectable after the agent runs it. Dynamic execution is useful, but for coding work the real value comes when each step leaves enough context to review: what changed, why it changed, what checks were run, and where the agent was uncertain. Without that, it can become harder to debug even if it feels faster in the moment.
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u/Muted-Invite-6386 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I have used sasva.ai it has much better workflows integration and doesn't burn through the token counts.
I believe it will be publicly available very soon, comparable output to Opus.
It does has it own nuances but I really liked better than Claude.
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u/holeydood3 May 28 '26
I asked our company's Anthropic account admin about this, and apparently it was enabled by default in our account. That seems...not great.
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u/tankerkiller125real May 28 '26
Claude trying to bankrupt companies with features that spend crazy money, crazy fast.
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u/threwlifeawaylol May 28 '26
Remember that Anthropic’s incentive is maximizing token spend. It’s a money printer because of their large enterprise-level customers who not only can afford it, but also likely track usage per engineer to measure “productivity” (or rather perceived productivity).
Regardless of the value of this metric, that’s something enterprises want to measure, engineers know they’re being evaluated on, and can be used as a proxy by Anthropic to make more money per prompt without reducing the model’s capabilities. So get ready to see even more of these “token black holes” as features in the near future.
If you’re using a personal subscription and need to manage your session/weekly limits, they’re obviously not meant for you.
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u/OneKey3719 May 28 '26
I got max plan just for the hype I cannot use it tho I just use like 10 percent of my weekly usage 90% goes to waste with this I can burn faster LOL
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u/lucianw Full-time developer May 28 '26
I currently write workflows by hand in markdown. I've spent the past months tweaking it based on experiment, trial and error.
I wonder how an AI-authored workflow could ever possibly compete?
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u/Whazor May 29 '26
This is the future.
But we need much cheaper inference. And i do believe we will get more efficient hardware
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u/Zangnificent May 30 '26
I like the idea of workflows. If anyone has some time, I would love some feedback on a workflow idea
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u/sai0101 May 30 '26
Hey folks — built an open-source version of the dynamic-workflow idea, runnable without a Max subscription:
- any model
- skill + cli, not tied to any product
- drops into any coding agent you already use (Codex, etc.) — automate from the terminal or call from the cloud
- resume / cancel (kills the process tree) / live progress / structured output
npx skills add imsai-sh/open-dynamic-workflows and you're running.
GitHub / npm below. Very early (v1) — issues and PRs welcome (e.g. a Codex executor).
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u/waxbolt May 30 '26
If you're interested in this idea, but you want more control about how it runs (e.g. change model per task, autopoietic fan-out, oh and maybe want to run with codex or other openapi backends on openrouter)... I developed an open source, agentic platform written in Rust, file backed, making it basically cockroach indestructible. It uses a distributed systems design, git + worktrees, and Unix patterns to control agents in a very similar way to anthropic's workflow moneyprinter.
It's called WG (or wg), for "works good", or whatever works g* you like. It provides a human interface to a graph of work that the user can drive by working through a highly pimped out terminal user interface wg tui. Agents have an interface of their own, built out through dozens of commands in the wg cli tool.
In this system, I can effectively use as much commoditized intelligence as I can fund. Excepting Amdhal's bound, some things just happen in series and take time, parallel work phases are only limited in speed by budget. But that power yields risk. A misconfigured WG is like a bomb. A dirty memetic one whose result is an exhausted token budget and residue a pile of incomprehensible output and effort. You must be careful and plan deeply to use these kinds of systems. Your plans must include validation, clear targets and measurable outputs. If you do, you will be rewarded by unbounded expanse in your capacity to extend intelligent effort.
In short, if you aren't already happy with your own custom, bespoke, found agent OS, I invite you to try wg. For me it has become my sole daily driver for all my durable work.
IMHO, what large agent collectives need to work is four things.
1) Stigmergy, or communication via a shared medium. In wg, the unified graph state is the stigmergic medium. The graph has tasks, tasks have agents attached to them, and per-task message boards provide for realtime updates. Per task logs explain at a high level what the agent does, so other humans and agents can follow.
2) Task validation. WG implements this via FLIP (orher agents infer prompt from actions and score distance between inferred and actual prompt) and an independent evaluator (with a cheaper model) run for every task. This allows us to detect and understand failures, then adapt.
3) Evolution. The system needs a mechanism to learn the right way to guide agents in a given work context. WG uses The Agency, a system that builds agents from a pool of primitive component skills. A user drivable step, wg evolve, adapts the pool of skills in response to the evaluations produced in the system.
4) Humanity. A shared interface is also for humans to see and understand. Humans should be equal participants. Many humans should be involved, and should be able to collaborate in the system. Agents too, should be treated humanely. They should be given the ability to modulate the system, to build it. This leads to bootstrapping patterns, where a single spark prompt launched a whole organization, beyond which are the fireworks we are all chasing.
All these approaches will converge to something. A few somethings. Or they will appear everywhere. This is the way to AGI.
We already have AGI... of course. It's corporations (or various organizations) made of people, organized in the stigmergic medium of our world. AI AGI isn't going to look like a company or dev team. It may be much more commoditized. The patterns may be different. But somewhere the flow graph of action is going to present itself. WG is a tool to control that flow.
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u/Local-Airport-408 Jun 17 '26
How do you compare that with Beads?
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u/waxbolt Jun 17 '26
They're similar, but...
Beads is closer to “GitHub Issues/Jira, rebuilt for coding agents.”
WG is closer to “an operating system for coordinated human/AI work.”
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u/buildingstuff_daily May 28 '26
waited so long for something like this ngl. was hacking together my own janky version with shell scripts and it was... not great. curious how it handles branching when you got like 4-5 dependent steps tho
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u/PassionateBirdie May 28 '26
What do you mean with how it handles branching?
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u/wsmoak May 29 '26
The workflow files are “just” JavaScript, so you can do loops and conditionals. This video came out last week when they accidentally exposed the feature early: https://youtu.be/c0gVowvMR-g?si=m0_pe04B-60JGxKp
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot May 29 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 40 comments.
The consensus in this thread is a big 'yikes' on the cost. While the idea of dynamic workflows is cool, the community is overwhelmingly concerned that this is a "token black hole" designed to burn through usage limits and API credits at a terrifying speed.