Parallel-agents: running multiple agents at the same time in the same codebase

[Juice10]

What: Explore how to manage multiple AI agents operating in parallel within a single codebase.
Why: Having multiple agents collaborate in real-time could speed up development tasks, each agent handling a different facet of the project—like front-end, back-end, or testing.

Questions:

• How do we orchestrate communication and prevent conflicts between agents?
• What concurrency models or worker-thread approaches might help keep them from stepping on each other’s toes?
• What are the resource implications—if LLM is run locally, do we risk overloading the system with too many concurrent tasks?
• Let’s brainstorm implementation details, benefits, trade-offs, and potential pitfalls!

Related tickets:

• Feature Request: Addition of Task Parallelization Feature RooCodeInc/Roo-Code#549
• Async / Parallel tasks RooCodeInc/Roo-Code#2985
• Enable Simultaneous Execution for all Modes - Possible Windsuf/Cursor/firebase NUCLEAR KILLER RooCodeInc/Roo-Code#2861
• Multi-Agent Software Development with Cline cline/cline#1007

Keywords: concurrent, simultaneous, multi-agent, async.

[kevinvandijk]

Roo actually supports this in a way. As in: you should be able to open multiple vscode windows and run seperate agents in each window. We could maybe leverage that into multiple instances within the same window as well

[janpaul123]

But they'd operate on the same files, right? It'd be cool if you can do things like, fork the same codebase 5 times, and let agents do the same task in 5 different ways, e.g. with different architectural approaches. Then come back and select the one you like best.

[ofou]

I’d find it more useful to have a next button to circle results from different models. We can start with a very fast one, and then come up with more elaborated answers with bigger models as they become available, so you don't have to work with multiples repos, but with checkpoints like git patches.

[janpaul123]

The new Codex product has this. Top HN comment:

Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run a bunch of tasks at the same time (something that's really hard to do in Cursor, Cline, etc.)

[janpaul123]

Cursor also has this now! "Background agents": https://forum.cursor.com/t/cursor-0-50-new-tab-model-background-agent-refreshed-inline-edit/92348