Hive: A Lightweight Multi-Agent Orchestrator

2025 was the "year of agents". We focused on making LLMs more autonomous and able to coherently work on tasks for longer and longer time horizons. Claude Code made working with LLMs akin to pair programming with a very skilled but inexperienced junior developer. Some time in December 2025, with the release of Opus 4.5, a step-wise increase in capability became noticeable. Claude was able to work and verify work by itself for hours at a time. One obvious way to parallelize work here is to tmux many Claude Code instances and have them work on separate issues in different parts of the codebase. This became so common that Anthropic and TPOT refer to this as "multi-Clauding". In Steve Yegge's parlance, this is level 6/7 of agentic coding. tmux is great, but you run into natural limitations in cognitive overhead. Even the most brilliant (i.e. ADHD) developers become overwhelmed when trying to steer 8+ different Claudes at once. It is usually just too hard to figure out how to compose several