Your Five Coding Agents Are Probably Stuck on a Permission Prompt Right Now
Yesterday a small open source build shipped for anyone running several coding agents at once. It’s called Openbar, and the twist is what it fixes. It isn’t the model or the prompts. It’s you.
The builder (u/Significant-Sea-7238 on r/PromptEngineering) started running multiple Claude Code and Codex sessions in parallel. Most of the lost time wasn’t the model thinking. It was a session sitting on a permission prompt in a tab nobody was watching. Five agents working, one waiting politely for a human who is looking at a different window.
If you’ve done this, you know the feeling. You kick off a refactor in one terminal, a test fix in another, and a docs cleanup in a third. Twenty minutes later you glance over and realize the refactor stopped after about ninety seconds. It asked to run a shell command, nobody answered, and it has been idle ever since. The agent didn’t fail. It just waited. Multiply that by five sessions and a big chunk of your “parallel” speedup quietly disappears.
So Openbar puts every session into the MacBook notch. On Windows and Linux it shows up as a floating island instead. You can read the diff and approve it right from there, without hunting through terminal tabs. The notch is a smart spot for this because it’s always on screen, no matter which app or window you’re in. You don’t have to remember to check anything. The prompt comes to you instead of you going to the prompt.
The second piece is just as useful. Each session can get its own git worktree, so parallel agents don’t edit the same files and trample each other. If you haven’t used worktrees before, think of them as extra working folders that all share one repository history. Each agent gets its own folder and its own branch, so one agent’s half-finished edit never shows up inside another agent’s context. That alone removes a whole class of weird bugs, like an agent “fixing” a failing test that was only failing because a different agent was mid-change.
Here’s the mini-workflow:
- 1️⃣ Install Openbar from the GitHub repo (MF-DEEV/Openbar). It’s free and open source, so skim the README for your OS first, since the notch version and the floating island version behave a little differently.
- 2️⃣ Start your Claude Code and Codex sessions as usual. Nothing about your existing setup has to change, and you can mix both tools in the same batch.
- 3️⃣ Give each session its own git worktree so every agent works in its own copy of the code. A quick way to do it by hand is
git worktree add ../my-repo-agent-a -b agent-a, then point the session at that folder. - 4️⃣ Keep working, and when an agent needs permission, it shows in the notch or island. Read the diff, allow or skip, and get back to what you were doing.
Pro tips:
Split tasks by area of the codebase before you launch agents. Worktrees stop file collisions while the agents run, but you still have to merge their branches afterward. Tasks that don’t overlap make that merge boring, and boring is what you want. A good rule of thumb: one agent on the backend, one on the frontend, one on tests or docs. If two agents would both need to touch the same config file or the same shared utility, give that work to one agent and let the other wait.
Read the diff before you allow anything. A faster approval flow is only a win if you still look at what you’re approving. The point is fewer missed prompts, not more blind clicks. If you catch yourself hitting allow without reading, slow down and tighten the task instead, because a vague task is usually what produces a noisy diff.
Name your branches after the task, not the agent. Something like fix-login-redirect is far easier to review and merge than agent-3. When five branches land on your desk at once, clear names are the difference between a ten minute merge session and an hour of detective work.
Start with two agents, not five. Get comfortable with the approval rhythm and the merge step, then add a third. Your own attention is the real limit here, and it helps to find where yours tops out before you stack the deck against yourself.
The post had no comments and only 2 upvotes when I saw it, so this is early. It’s a very real bottleneck though. Once you pass two or three agents, your attention becomes the limiting factor, not the model. Tools like this are interesting because they don’t try to make the model smarter. They make the human loop cheaper, and that’s where a lot of the remaining speed is hiding right now. Early projects also move fast on feedback, so a clear bug report or a feature request today can shape where this goes.
Call to action: if you run parallel agents, try Openbar and send the builder feedback on GitHub. Then tell me how many agents you can babysit before the notch starts blinking at you 🏴☠
Running 5 coding agents at once, the bottleneck became me missing their permission prompts
by u/Significant-Sea-7238 in PromptEngineering