Running agents in parallel

One agent is easy to supervise: you watch it work. Four is a different job. The bottleneck stops being the model and starts being you — knowing which one needs an answer, which one is still going, and which one just finished and is waiting.

Astra’s answer has two halves. Worktree spaces make it safe to run several agents at once. The sidebar makes it legible.

Starting work in parallel

Create a worktree space per piece of work and send each one off. Because every space has its own checkout and branch, they don’t interact: two agents can install different dependencies, rewrite the same file, and run the same test suite at the same time without any of it colliding.

There’s no ceiling in the app. The practical limit is your machine and your plan’s rate limits.

Keeping track

The left sidebar is the control surface. Spaces sort themselves into In progress while an agent is working and Inbox when it stops, so “what needs me?” is a glance rather than a hunt. Spaces you haven’t looked at since the agent finished carry an unread marker. Pin the ones you’re actively steering.

Each space also shows how its branch stands relative to your home branch — commits ahead and behind — and, once a pull request exists, what state it’s in. You can watch a set of branches converge without opening any of them.

Forking a conversation

Sometimes the fork you want is in the conversation, not the repo. Astra can branch a chat at any earlier message and continue from there, which is the fix for a turn that went wrong: rewind to just before it, rephrase, and go again.

Where the fork lands is your choice, and it’s a separate question from isolation:

Fork to	What you get
A new tab	Same space, same checkout — a side thread on the same work.
A local space	New space in the sidebar, still your project folder — a new exploration you want tracked separately.
A worktree space	New space with its own branch and copy — the isolation fork.

Running several tabs in one space

Parallelism doesn’t have to mean parallel branches. A space can hold several chat tabs, all against the same checkout, which is the right shape when two conversations are genuinely about the same change — one writing the code, one reading it back. Just remember that tabs in a space share files: they can overwrite each other exactly the way local spaces can.

Practical notes

• Give each space one job. The clean-branch, clean-PR payoff depends on the branch containing one reviewable change.
• Set a setup command. Every worktree runs it, so a project that needs pnpm install should say so once rather than in every conversation. See Project setup.
• Archive when you’re done. Reclaims the disk, keeps the history. See Archiving and deleting.
• Keep your Mac awake. If long runs get cut short by sleep, there’s a setting in Settings › General › System to hold it open.