Holiday Hack – `crew` Agent Orchestration

Good engineers have always invested in their own tools. That seems like it's going to go even wilder in the new Opus 4.5 era (and beyond). Custom tooling that would have taken months to build and maintain is now a weekend project.

Agent orchestration, especially distributed orchestration, is going to be particularly tricky. We're in the early invention phase where everyone's figuring out their own approach to coordination, state management, merge conflicts, and so on.

I built crew, a project I can't recommend anyone else use. Still, the idea is simple enough. It uses a local ticket "database" (just files in a repo) with minimal dependencies. The system pops tickets off a queue and farms them out to separate git worktrees, letting agents execute tickets in parallel. Then we use Claude to merge everything back together.

I pointed it at crew itself to handle a backlog of improvements. It made quick work of tasks that would have taken me hours spread across several days. Almost unsettlingly quick. It removed some of the joy of working on the project because it executed so fast I barely had time to think about the problems.

The tooling is rough and the approach is naive, but it worked. That's part of the point: things are ephemeral now and we can embrace that. We can build tools that do what we need, now, and not worry about preserving them if we can just regenerate them rapidly.