[neilbb]

If you impl this as a backend and connect to Telegram bots, agents can just do `$ ask "Should I do this?"` for agent→human and `$ alert "this thing blocked me"` for coder→planner. That's what I'm actually doing — I have 1 manager + 3 designers + 1 researcher + 2 debugger + 1 communicator + any number of temporal coders/reviewers in my setup, all connected to taskwarrior for task-driven-dev

[mizioand]

That is pretty cool building the whole dev team of agents and is it still with a star topology of a Manager agent interacting with all the other subagents?

I usually spawn 1 Mother Agent in a star topology with 3 subagents Planner, Reviewer, Implementer and them let them talk using Claude built-in agent tool. But the best thing I think was probably that a "do-nothing" setup wizard is part of the workflow.

https://github.com/mizioandOrg/claude-planner-reviewer-imple...

Did you have success with running stuff in a pipeline and being requested for input in agent->human needed scenarios?

[neilbb]

Yeah the pipeline runs effectively and I'm able to be in the loop when the loop needs me.

In my setup there are two planes — manager and worker. On the manager plane, all primary agents form a mesh with p2p communication. Each designer connects to 1 or more workers in a star topology, since workers may have questions or get blocked while executing a plan.

The limitation of the built-in agent tool is it doesn't allow nested subagent spawning. But it's normal for a designer or researcher to need subagents — when a plan is done, I use a plan-review-leader agent to review it. If you try mother → planner → plan-review-leader → plan-vs-reality-validator, the nesting gets deep fast and blocks your manager from doing other work.

I wrote a blog post about this yesterday: https://dev.to/neil_agentic/ttal-more-than-a-harness-enginee...

[mizioand]

I like your 2-plane mesh setup with multiple top-level agents and 'you' on the manager plane mesh that are able to communicate via a daemon mediated communication.

The daemon is the Telegram bridge, the tmux router, the CI status deliverer, and the cleanup coordinator all in one process. It allows for cross star topology communication unlike MoMa that basically just corresponds to a single manager and is similar to your plan-review-leader agent living in the manager plane if that one was isolated.

My previous concern was that maybe you would face a timeout in case user input was needed during a pipeline run, and in a case where the user was too slow to provide an answer through telegram (I imagine during the night), but maybe even github pipelines can be set to wait unlimited.

I really like the setup, and exactly I also faced the no nested agent spawning limit by Anthropic for Claude Code built-in agent tooling, that dictates the star topology in the first place.

I use the git worktree as well for every MoMa agent and they all live in Linux screen session. Maybe I should consider going to tmux myself instead of screen as I understand all your agents in top-level manager plane also are just tmux sessions.

[neilbb]

also wrote a note about ttal's multi-agent patterns: https://dev.flicknote.app/notes/5a95cdcd-bb63-4eb6-9961-7007...

[mizioand]

I had a look and I understand that maybe you also use flicknote.app for agent context management.

[neilbb]

using a single plan-reviewer would be slow when there are multiple aspects to review. That's why a local star topology with a plan-review-leader is needed: it spawns multiple reviewers in parallel, each focused on a different aspect.

[mizioand]

Yeah, with a 2 plane topology you are able to inherit concurrency as you for instance just hand off work from a designer agent to the plan-review-leader that spawns any number of reviewers in a star topology.