Run Four Coding Agents at Once

Tool Teardown this week: Orca, an Agent Development Environment for running a fleet of coding agents in parallel instead of babysitting one at a time.

You've got several coding agents, all yours to run, and instead of queuing them up one after another, Orca lets you fire them off together and check back when they're done. It's on GitHub with over 42,000 stars, and the daily growth on that repo is not normal for something this young.

Getting started is easier than the star count makes it look. You don't clone it. It's a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux, so you download a build or install it with Homebrew, and then you point it at the coding agent subscriptions you already pay for. No new API keys, no separate billing. You're not paying twice for the same tokens, you're just running more of them at once.

What it's actually good at is throughput. Say you've got three small fixes, a test suite to write and a config change. Run that the old way and it's four sequential conversations, each waiting on the last one to finish. Orca kicks all four off together. You go make a coffee, and you come back to four finished jobs instead of one. There are iOS and Android companions as well, so the checking back can happen from your phone rather than from the desk you were trying to get away from.

It's built for people who already run an agent solo most days and have started to feel the ceiling, not for someone opening a coding agent for the first time.

What it's not good at is anything with dependencies between the tasks. If agent two needs to see what agent one just wrote, running them in parallel just hands you a merge conflict to untangle by hand later, which costs you more time than the parallel run ever saved. Orca is a tool for independent work, not a coordination layer. Don't mistake it for one.

And it's TypeScript, built fast, trending hard. Expect rough edges. That combination usually ships something useful a long time before it ships something polished, and I'd be surprised if Orca turned out to be the exception.

Who should use it: anyone already running Claude Code or something similar daily who's hit the point of doing one thing at a time and wanting more. If you haven't found your first agent workflow yet, skip this and come back once you have.

One line verdict: it does exactly what it says on the tin. If you're not already bottlenecked on sequential agent work you won't feel the difference yet, but you will eventually.

Open Orca against a repo you already use with Claude Code. Pick three small, unrelated tasks, the kind you'd normally run one after the other without thinking about it. Run all three at once instead. Time it, then compare against your usual sequential habit.

Watch your own waiting time rather than the total runtime, because waiting is the number sequential working quietly inflates while nobody ever writes it down.

You'll come out with one of two things. A new default way of working, or a clear reason not to bother yet. Both are useful, and neither is a waste of fifteen minutes.

Try it and tell me in the comments what happened. I read every one.

Forward this to one person who should be using AI better than they are. Reply with what you built, tried or broke this week. I read every one.

Gareth, founder of The Anthropic Stack (theanthropicstack.com)