Addy Osmani's Three-Tier Agent Orchestration: Single Terminal → Local Worktrees → Cloud VMs

Addy Osmani·high signal

Addy Osmani's 'Code Agent Orchestra' framework categorizes all 2026 agent tooling into three tiers: Tier 1 (single terminal—Claude Code subagents, no extra tooling), Tier 2 (local multi-agent—3-10 agents in isolated worktrees with dashboards and diff review, using tools like Conductor, Claude Squad, Antigravity), Tier 3 (cloud—agents in VMs with no local setup, including Claude Code Web, GitHub Copilot, Jules, Codex). Key finding: three focused agents consistently outperform one generalist working 3x longer. Most developers in 2026 use all three tiers—Tier 1 for interactive, Tier 2 for parallel sprints, Tier 3 for overnight backlog draining.