When I started building isomux, 8 parallel agents seemed more than enough for a given project.

But we are in the swarm era, so I added a hatch on the floor that leads to a back room, effectively increasing the room cap to 108.

I picked up a useful piece of terminology from the gas city blog post: light vs dark software factory. It's about how transparent it is what agents are doing.

It's a spectrum, and you usually want a mix. There are your go-to agents, agents you check in with occasionally, and workers other agents delegate to behind the scenes.

Claude Code popularized "subagents" for workers, which I dislike for being too "dark".

With Isomux, I lean on the light side even for workers. They are first-class agents, just tucked away in the back room.

(Isomux agents still can and indeed do spawn subagents, but my typical workflows are based on first-class worker agents and inter-agent communication)