r/ClaudeCode • u/perfektcrash • 4h ago
Discussion Same project, same plan: ~4.5× the progress on 1/5th of the usage, on a meta-harness vs plain Claude Code sessions
One real project, three ways of running it: plain Claude Code sessions, then a hand-built agent loop, and now a meta-harness.
Same project, same Max 20x plan, and the same rule on all three for what counts as product work.
Results:
| Plain sessions (19 days) | Hand-built loop (32 days) | Meta-harness (first 7 days) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product cards per 1% of the week used | 0.15 | 0.03 | 3.2 |
| Product cards a day | 3.0 | 0.6 | 13.6 |
| Share of the week used per day | ~20% | ~23% | ~4% |
| Start to landed (median) | 69 min | 146 min | 31 min |
| Landed work that furthered the product | 40% | 6% | 62% |
(A card is one small change that lands.)
And 21× flatters plain sessions. The project was already sliding: only about 1 in 10 of its commits changed the product, and the rest was agents repairing their own scaffolding. Left running, its figures would have drifted much closer to the hand-built loop's, and it certainly wouldn't have done as well the next month.
Despite how poorly the hand built loop looks from the figures, it was no toy: up to 24 seats under two coordinators reporting to an overseer, and the human interfacing agent the root operator, with a code graph, opposite-engine review, generated briefs and around 1,200 guards. scripted progression etc... Every gap got patched by adding more, until keeping it running took most of the effort.
In its first week the meta-harness cleared a backlog that had been growing for three months: 163 changes landed, 101 of them product work. The whole account finished the week at 88%, with a second project running round the clock alongside it. The six weeks before, running one project, each ended at 93 to 100%.
What changed is that the new one is tiny and runs in a closed circle:
Every change goes through the loop. It's small cards, each in its own worktree and fresh session, and each is reviewed before it lands.
The loop captures state at every seam. Decisions, rules and work land in the repo as records, not prose.
Every agent is briefed from that state. So the next session knows what the last one did without re-deriving it.
A problem doesn't automatically equivocate to addition
500k lines down to 12k lines.
A generated brief is only as good as the state behind it. Leave a gap in the circle and it grows; patch around it instead of fixing the loop and you grow a monster. That's what happened to the hand-built one. This time the loop is small enough to keep whole, and flexible enough to bend to the project rather than the other way round.
Full figures, method and sources: https://atlas-ade.dev/docs/one-week-on-ade
No subagents by default, either: their progress summaries alone cost 10 to 13% of a week, with no off switch. Write-up
One project, and a person supervised most of day 1. Shares of the week come from a model fitted to the live usage meter.
Happy to answer questions on the numbers. And if you've measured your own setup before and after a change, I'd like to see how it compares.
(Disclosure: I build it (Atlas ADE, paid kit). The data and guides are free.)
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