The Chief of Staff Pattern: One Claude Code session coordinates, others execute

Orchestrating Claude Code Agents: The Chief of Staff Pattern

This post describes a pattern for running long Claude Code sessions reliably: separate coordination from execution. One long-lived session assigns work, verifies claims, and records lessons, while short-lived sessions do the actual coding. State lives in a durable external board, not in context. The key discipline is to never trust an agent's self-report—re-run the commands and check exit codes. cmux is used to spawn execution workspaces. The pattern is essentially orchestrator-worker; the author calls it Chief of Staff but notes it's different from Anthropic's calendar-managing agent of the same name.

Why it matters: A practical engineering pattern piece with real substance, not generic advice. The author splits long-running Claude Code work into coordinator + executor layers, uses an external board instead of conversation context for state, and the core discipline is 'don't trust agent se...