Five Claude sessions, one product
How I run three to five parallel build agents against isolated worktrees on a single product — and why the bottleneck isn't typing speed.
April 8, 2026
When people ask how I ship indie products on top of a full-time engineering job, the answer is: I don't ship them alone. I ship them with Claude as a co-author, a reviewer, and — when the spec is sharp enough — three to five build agents I run in parallel against isolated git worktrees. That last part is what changed the math.
The bottleneck isn't typing
The popular framing of AI-augmented dev is that it makes you type faster. It doesn't. A senior engineer already types faster than they can think.
The real leverage is upstream — deciding what to build, in what order, and what not to build. When you have five agents running in parallel, you can't micromanage any of them. You have to commit to the slice each one owns before they start. That forces a kind of spec discipline that pays off even on solo work.
The loop
1. Spec before code. Every feature begins as a one-page brief — user story, edge cases, success criteria, the invariants I won't compromise on. Written in conversation with Claude, but I own the final version. The spec is source of truth, not the code.
2. Parallel execution in worktrees. Three to five Claude Code sessions run in isolated git worktrees. Each owns one slice: UI, API, migration, copy, infra. They never see each other's code. They check in when their slice is green and the merge is mine.
3. Trunk-based, ship daily. Real users hit changes within hours, which is the only review that actually matters. Friday is for trimming dead branches and deciding where to double down next.
Where it breaks
Parallel sessions fall apart when the slices aren't really independent. The second a migration depends on an API change that depends on a UI decision, you're back to serial. I've learned to structure features so the slices stay independent — and to stop optimizing the architecture when they don't, because that's a tell that the spec wasn't sharp enough.
The unsexy part
None of this is novel. The novelty is doing it consistently — on Pinit, on Clipwise, on Dad Co-Pilot, on Thaloop — while also showing up for a day job in production fintech. That isn't a function of typing speed or model choice. It's a function of writing fewer lines than most engineers, and writing them inside a much tighter loop.