I Ported OpenAI's Symphony to Claude Code: A Complete Build Diary

A few weeks ago, OpenAI open-sourced Symphony — an Elixir-based orchestrator that polls a project board, claims tickets, spins up Codex agents in isolated workspaces, manages multi-turn sessions, and handles retries. It's the missing piece between "AI can write code" and "AI can work through a backlog." I watched the demo and immediately thought: I want this, but for Claude Code. This is the build diary of that port. Every phase, every bug, every design decision — and the one architectural flaw that made me question how AI agents should handle failure. Credit first: this isn't my idea Let me be clear upfront: the architecture is OpenAI's. Symphony is their project, their design, their Elixir implementation. The polling loop, workspace isolation, multi-turn agent sessions, exponential backoff — all of that comes from their work. What I built is a port. Same concept, different stack: OpenAI Symphony My Port Language Elixir TypeScript Agent Codex Claude Code CLI Tracker Linear Linear Runt