What I Learned Supervising 5 AI Agents on a Real Project

I ran 5 AI coding agents in parallel on a real Rust project for a week. Not a demo. Not a toy. A 51K-line codebase with real users. Here's what happened — with actual numbers. The Setup Project: A Rust CLI tool with a daemon, tmux integration, message routing, and a kanban board parser. Team configuration: 1 architect (Claude Opus) — plans and decomposes work 1 manager (Claude Opus) — dispatches tasks, handles escalations 3 engineers (Codex) — parallel execution in isolated worktrees Duration: 5 working days, ~6 hours per day supervised. Tasks: Backlog of features, refactors, and bug fixes that had been accumulating for weeks. The Numbers Metric Result Tasks completed 47 Tasks failed and reassigned 8 Test gate catches (merge blocked) 12 Context exhaustions 3 Merge conflicts 4 Lines changed ~8,200 Total time supervised ~30 hours Estimated sequential time ~120 hours 47 tasks in 30 hours of supervision. The same work would have taken me roughly 120 hours doing it sequentially — 4x compres