Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

> If I tell them exactly how to build something the work needed to review the resulting changes is a whole lot less taxing.

Totally matches my experience- the act of planning the work, defining what you want and what you don’t, ordering the steps and declaring the verification workflows—-whether I write it or another engineer writes it, it makes the review step so much easier from a cognitive load perspective.

Git worktrees are global mutable state; all containers on your laptop are contending on the same git database. This has a couple of rough edges, but you can work around it.

I prefer instead to make shallow checkouts for my LXC containers, then my main repo can just pull from those. This works just like you expect, without weird worktree issues. The container here is actually providing a security boundary. With a worktree, you need to mount the main repo's .git directory; a malicious process could easily install a git hook to escape.

This is a great article and not sure why it got so few upvotes. It captures the way we have been working for a while and why we developed and open sourced Rover (https://endor.dev/blog/introducing-rover), our internal tool for managing coding agents. It automates a lot of what Simon describes like setting up git worktrees, giving each agent its own containerized environment and allowing mixing and matching agents from different vendors (ie Claude and Codex) for different tasks

Thanks Simon - you asked us to share patterns that work. Coincidentally I just finished writing up this post:

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2025/10/06/delegating-grunt-work...

Using AI Agents to implement UI automation tests - a task that I have always found time-consuming and generally frustrating!

good point