I create large hierarchical plans, and have a coordinator agent divvy up the work. It's extremely effective.

I created an orchestration skill for myself (using herdr but any persistent mechanism works). So I then only interact with a front session and it will triage and dispatch each request to the relevant spaces (each of them can have multiple worktrees of the same project), summarize movements and pending decisions for me all at once. I do not directly interact with a multiplexer or any dashboard.

This seems complex and expensive, and I suppose the only reason to do this is because you want to generate code faster? Do you really have so much code to write that a single LLM is too slow?

And then on top of that you need another agent to manage merging all of the subagent code together?

I don't do this at my day job (coworkers would be pretty mad). This is for software ideas that come up weekly that I need to execute to at least MVP before I ever need branching/merging

Not complex at all, only one extra session other than the ones doing work and it's on a dumb model and can be thrown away & restarted because it only dispatches work, not doing anything.

I do everything in there, collecting requirements, kick off research, branching, merging, not one other agent on top. I considered making that orchestration command llm-powered but it's not justified at my current use.

It's not more expensive, in fact I could have just chugged along with the slow and manual session by session work but I have a claude subscription and another GLM one (the most low cost basic tier, not even much), that just sit there collecting dust if I don't put them to use in a more efficient way.

And doing session by session would face your problem when context switching too much become unscalable.