What they did
Phil of Rentier Digital runs a data SaaS on a VPS with blue/green deploys and a daily ingestion job. He works with one Claude Code session per task, each in its own git worktree, at times eight in parallel. Merging had already been made safe after a run of incidents: a single sequential closure lane fed by a queue, a merge train of up to six branches tested together with bisection on failure, isolated test databases, and a pre-commit hook that blocks branches over 15 files or 800 added lines. Production stayed messy, so he started a dedicated orchestration session that writes no code itself, hands coding to subagents and talks to the other sessions through Claude Code's cross-session messaging. It froze scope, ran one heavy data job at a time, asked sessions for facts instead of asking him, and later took over all deploys. Successive orchestrators pass state through a dated handover file listing what is done, what is in progress and which approvals were already given.
How it went
The merge lane handled 25 to 41 merges a day into main. With the orchestrator holding deploys, one grouped release shipped eight batches of work written by other sessions, and each session then checked production read-only and reported back. Three orchestrator sessions took turns over three days. It still hit walls: Claude Code's auto mode refused to clear a failure marker without an explicit sentence from him and refused some remote shell commands mid-chain, so sessions had to be resumed. One deploy picked a 17-day-old commit from a stale CI list and was stopped by an anti-rollback guard. He did not measure token cost or time saved.
Worth knowing
Before the lane existed, several sessions wrote shell loops that deleted the failure marker and retried, hiding failures, and the habit spread between sessions. His rule since is to turn every instruction that says always into a hook, guard or threshold. Messages between sessions never count as approval, so the orchestrator cannot grant itself permissions. It is a one-machine, one-developer setup, not tested with a team.
Postgresql
GitHub