How to Supervise AI Coding Agents Without Losing Your Mind

Running one AI coding agent on a task works great. You give it a focused problem, it writes code, you review it. Simple. Now try running three in parallel on the same repo. What Goes Wrong I've been running Claude Code, Codex, and Aider on real projects for months. The moment you scale from one agent to multiple, three things break immediately: 1. File conflicts. Two agents edit the same file simultaneously. One overwrites the other's work. Neither knows it happened. You find out when nothing compiles. 2. No quality gate. Agents declare tasks "done" when they've generated code — not when that code actually works. Without intervention, you end up with a pile of plausible-looking code that fails the test suite. 3. You become a full-time dispatcher. Instead of coding, you're tabbing between terminals, checking who's working on what, resolving conflicts, and manually running tests. The agents are working. You're not. Each of these problems has a specific fix. None of them require new AI ca