A year ago I coded one thing at a time. I'd open a terminal, work on a feature, finish it, move to the next thing. The throughput ceiling was however fast I could type and think.

Now I wake up to PRs my agents wrote overnight, a morning digest of analytics across all five of my products, and a daily SEO sweep that already patched two articles before I opened my laptop. The volume changed — not because I got faster, but because the agents run while I don't.

What my agents actually do

These aren't hypothetical. Each one runs on a real project today:

glp3-daily mines Reddit and YouTube for unanswered questions about retatrutide, researches them against medical papers via Firecrawl, patches articles with grounded FAQ additions, runs the production build as a gate, and pushes straight to main. It fires at 7:07am daily and has been running for weeks. The site is glp3.wiki.

johnkueh-daily does the same thing for this site. It mines Reddit, YouTube channels (Sequoia, YC, Lenny's Podcast), WhatsApp group chats, Slack DMs, and X for questions about Claude Code and AI engineering. It clusters the questions, maps them to existing articles, researches grounding sources, patches the MDX, and runs the build gate before pushing.

daily-digest pulls signups, top user activity, API and LLM costs, and git activity across subs.rip, journeys.im, and glp3.wiki. It surfaces the numbers I'd otherwise forget to check.

triage scans Slack for messages I've flagged with the eyes emoji, searches Notion for existing tickets, and creates new ones for anything untracked.

groom scans recent PRs and Notion tasks, then suggests status transitions and content updates for my task board.

That's a daily SEO writer, a cross-project analytics dashboard, a Slack-to-Notion ticket pipeline, and a task board groomer. A year ago, that list would've been a full-time ops hire. Now it's five skills and a few scheduled loops.

Loops — the pattern that makes this work

/loop is the simplest thing in Claude Code and the one that changed my output the most. It runs a prompt on a recurring interval — every few minutes, every hour, or self-paced. The SEO mines, the morning digest, a PR babysitter that rebases and fixes CI — they're all loops.

Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, talked about this at Sequoia's AI Ascent: he runs dozens of loops at any time. One babysits PRs. One keeps CI healthy. One clusters Twitter feedback every 30 minutes. He described loops as "the future" — the simplest thing that works.

The one constraint: loops only run while Claude Code is open on your machine. If you close your laptop, the loop stops. Routines are the server-side version — same idea, but they keep going even when you're offline.

Running many agents at once

I usually have two or three sessions going in split terminal panes. One on the main task, one or two on background work. That's enough to feel like I'm shipping in parallel without losing track.

Boris is at a different scale. He typically runs five to ten sessions with a few hundred agents across them, and spins up a few thousand overnight for deeper work. He hit 150 PRs in a single day as an experiment. I'm nowhere near that, but the point is: the ceiling is much higher than one terminal tab. The bottleneck is your ability to direct the agents, not the system's ability to run them.

claude agents is the built-in tool for keeping track. It's a TUI that shows which sessions need your input, which are still working, and which are done. Think tmux, but purpose-built for agent sessions. Once you're running more than two at a time, it's the cleanest way to stay oriented.

What doesn't work yet

Agents aren't magic. Here's where I still do the work myself:

Taste. Design decisions, copy voice, product judgment — anything where the right answer is subjective. I have skills that encode my house style and design rules, and they help, but the agent still needs me to look at the output and say yes or no.

Big codebases. Context windows fill up. If the task touches too many files across too many directories, the agent loses the thread. I scope the work tightly — small PRs, clear boundaries, one thing at a time.

Interactive auth. Anything that needs a browser login, an OAuth flow, or a 2FA prompt is still manual. MCP servers handle a lot of API access, but the interactive stuff is a gap.

Wrong turns. Agents occasionally go down a bad path and waste twenty minutes before I notice. That's the cost of autonomy. The fix is better skills — tighter constraints, clearer success criteria, explicit "stop and ask if" rules.

What this means for shipping speed

I maintain several live products — subs.rip, journeys.im, bq-analytics, and glp3.wiki. I write articles, run SEO loops, and do client work. A year ago that workload would've needed a team of three or four.

The agents don't replace thinking or judgment. They handle the volume — the mining, the patching, the ticket filing, the CI fixing, the overnight refactors. The work I do is directing: writing skills, scoping tasks, reviewing output, deciding what to ship next.

If you're evaluating whether one person can ship at this pace, this is how.