Multi-Agent Design Sprint
Five parallel coding agents restyled seven pages of this production site in a single session — isolated git worktrees, one committed design brief as the coherence contract, and an integration pass that merged five branches with zero conflicts.
01. Context & Problem
A full-site redesign, and agents that collide
A harsh design review produced an eight-item, ranked hit list spanning seven pages. Executing it serially meant days of work; executing it in parallel meant multiple coding agents editing one shared checkout.
Coding agents working the same repository overwrite each other's files, sweep unrelated changes into their commits, and produce unreviewable mixed diffs. Just as dangerous: five agents making independent taste decisions produce five different design systems. The problem wasn't writing the code — it was making parallel execution coherent and safe.
02. Constraints
Parallelism cheap, coherence expensive
Shared Codebase
One production Next.js repository; concurrent edits to shared files (design tokens, layout primitives) would corrupt every scope at once.
Design Coherence
Five independent agents means five interpretations of “polish” — the output had to read as one designer's hand.
Verification Budget
Five agents running builds and browser screenshots would contend for one machine; verification had to be tiered.
Interruption Tolerance
Agents can be killed mid-flight by usage limits. Recovery had to preserve their working context, not restart from zero.
03. Architecture
A brief-governed fan-out
Coherence came from a committed artifact, not from chat: every agent built against the same design brief, in its own worktree, behind the same gates.
Audit → Ranked Hit List
Full-site screenshot audit (every route, light + dark) diagnosed two root causes — no committed color moments after heroes, and pattern inflation (three chip palettes, three stripe schemes, four stat-tile styles). Findings became an eight-item ranked plan.
The Coherence Contract
A design brief committed to the repo before any agent launched: three named punch primitives (committed band, display numeral, single chip recipe), hard bans with match-and-refuse rules, AA and reduced-motion requirements, and a shared Chip component. Agents read the file — coordination never happened in chat.
Isolated Fan-Out
Five agents, each in its own git worktree on its own branch, with file-disjoint page scopes and dependencies symlinked. Shared files (global styles, layout primitives) were frozen — agents noted needed changes for the integrator instead of editing collision zones.
Tiered Gates & Integration
Each agent self-verified with lint and typecheck, then committed to its branch. The integrator merged all five (zero conflicts, by construction), ran the single production build, calibrated every page from screenshots in both themes, and ran an accessibility sweep before one reviewable PR.
04. Trade-offs & What Didn't Work
Resume beats respawn, and screenshots lie
What Broke: Mid-Flight Kills and False Positives
Interruptions: usage limits killed three agents mid-task — twice. Respawning would have re-derived all context at full cost. Instead, each agent was resumed from its transcript with a message pointing it back at its worktree state, and picked up exactly where it stopped.
Verification traps: full-page screenshots captured scroll-reveal content in its pre-reveal state, making finished sections look broken. Before “fixing” anything, a probe with real scrolling — run against both the branch and production — proved the behavior identical and pre-existing. The rule: when a screenshot contradicts the code, instrument the page before touching it.
$ the artifact
The site you are reading is the deliverable — these pages were restyled by the system this page describes.
The design brief, the five worktree branches, and the single integration PR are all in this site's history — the process is inspectable, not anecdotal.
05. Results
Parallel throughput, single-hand coherence
7 Pages
Restyled in one session by five parallel agents
0
Merge conflicts across five concurrent branches
40+
Banned design patterns removed site-wide
06. My Role
Architect of the system, not author of the diffs
I ran the audit and wrote the ranked plan, designed the partition (which scopes could run in parallel, which files had to freeze), authored the design brief that made five agents write like one, and performed the integration: merging, screenshot calibration in both themes, and the accessibility sweep. The agents wrote the code; the system made their output shippable.
Connected Systems
Orchestration Patterns