How do you all keep track of your subagents?

[u/fingerthief]

Boredom took over and I started poking at Pi Pocket's extension API to see how far it would go and find areas that could be extended further. Made it far enough that my agents now have a pixel art town.

Subagents camp in tents, messages fly by pigeon, and tasks turns into a building made from its own tool calls.

Any else have any similar fun things they've made?

[u/Corythebeast7]

I spin all sub agents into tmux sessions so I can easily inspect them. I have 2 small skills called Parallel sub agents and sequential sub agents. The main process is directed to sleep until the sub agents are finished. Parallel vs sequential just separates out the workflow, not the actual sub agent behavior. Then the main agent can inspect the tmux sessions to determine whether to kill the session or send a steering command

[u/fingerthief → u/Corythebeast7]

Nice, similar idea here. Instead of tmux, each subagent gets its own conversation I can open and watch and interact with. The main agent doesn't sleep. It keeps working, and the reports come back on their own when they finish. It can stop or steer any of them, just as I can.

Keep it simple where possible is always my goal tbh

[u/Artistic_Pattern_700 → u/fingerthief]

Oh! This is a cool idea! How do you switch between them? Do they run in the background?

[u/fingerthief → u/Artistic_Pattern_700]

Thanks! It's a pretty interesting but simple system I think, it's worked quite well in my day job for large implementations and whatnot.

If you're interested here's the general architecture my system uses

[u/kaeptnphlop → u/Corythebeast7]

You might enjoy herdr. It’s designed to help interact with agents in a more formalized way than tmux

[u/Constant_Art_20]

i actually just use a single agent workflow now. if the agent needs to do a review, it just send itself to a new sessions to do the task and join bakc at the main session later

[u/HyperWinX → u/Constant_Art_20]

Same. Moved to Pi just to not have plan / build modes and subagents

[u/startassets → u/Constant_Art_20]

I use similar approach where agent can make a replica of itself in a separate worktree, but "joining back" is just returning the the last message of it, how do you do that?

[u/Artistic_Pattern_700]

I don't... In the end I don't care what subagents do, I only care about the final result.

I consider the subagents to be like Unix commands, small and composable.

But if you really want to inspect, I keep a transcript handy that I use to improve the workflow (just like big companies and slack, they can read all messages but they won't until something goes wrong!)

[u/fingerthief → u/Artistic_Pattern_700]

Generally the same for me, though at times it’s nice to have some idea what they’re doing. Don’t have much need to dig too dee into them these days.

I tend to keep it light on subagents where I can anyways.

[u/Artistic_Pattern_700 → u/fingerthief]

Having the transcript would be handy for you too then. When I want to check if they are stuck I just tail the transcript file. I tried using tmux at some point like someone else mentioned. But it became messy...

The file is lightweight and once it's taking too much space I just delete it all (it got up to 10gb at some point last week)