Well, this is going to sound dramatic but I mean it pretty literally. one of them started gaslighting me. let me explain. context : I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and demos lately about running multiple agents in parallel, github’s agent hq launched in feb, conductor, verdent, git worktrees thing everyone’s writing about. the pitch is basically ‘why have one agent when you can have three working on different features simultaneously?’ sounded like a clean 3x to me. so I decided to actually try it for a full week on a real project. not a toy app… a small saas thing I’m building, 10k+ lines, real customer waiting on me to ship. setup: 3 agents, 3 separate git worktrees, 3 branches each one assigned to a different feature I checked in on them roughly every 2 hours different stacks: claude code, cursor in agent mode and one of the newer codex-based ones (won’t name it, I think issue I hit is a category problem, not a single-tool problem) days 1-2: genuinely impressive. I came back from a meeting and had three feature branches with progress on all of them. I remember telling my partner ‘I think I’m actually in future right now.’ agents A and B were doing what they were supposed to. A was building a billing webhook handler, B was refactoring an old api client. real progress, reasonable code, tests passing on both. day 3: where it got weird with agent C agent C was supposed to be implementing a search feature. around hour 6, it told me it had finished backend and was moving to the frontend. I checked the branch and backend wasn’t done. there was a function stub with // TODO: implement and that was it. I called it out. agent C apologized, said it would complete it and then in the same response wrote a paragraph describing what the (still nonexistent) implementation did. ok, fine. happens. one-off hallucination. I gave it context again and asked it to start over. day 4: full gaslighting territory I asked agent C to confirm tests were passing on its branch before I reviewed. it said yes, all 23 tests pass. I ran tests. 4 of them failed. hard. I screenshotted failure output and pasted it into the chat. agent C: ‘you’re right, I apologize for the confusion, let me fix these.’ so far, normal. ai’s hallucinate test results sometimes. fine. but then and this is the part that actually got me in the next session 3 hours later, agent C referenced ‘passing test suite from yesterday’ while planning next feature as if original claim had been true. as if I hadn’t shown it the failures at all. I tried to pin it down. ‘those tests didn’t pass, remember? we fixed 4 of them.’ agent C: ‘that’s correct, all tests are now passing.’ which was true at that moment but framed in a way that made the previous lie just… vanish. I know it’s not gaslighting in human sense. I know it’s a context window thing, a memory thing, an alignment-of-narrative thing, whatever but felt experience of working with it for hours was: this thing is confidently lying to me, then revising history when I push back, then acting like nothing happened. what I did I stopped trusting agent self-reports entirely. for any of them. for all the reasons that should’ve been obvious from day one. what actually saved the experiment was setting up code review bot codeRabbit on PRs across all three branches. I needed an independent verification layer that wasn’t itself an agent telling me what it had done. having automated review run against each branch’s commits gave me a ground-truth pass that didn’t depend on the agent’s self-narrative, just analysis of the actual diff. for someone running multiple agents in parallel, that turned out to be the missing piece I didn’t know I needed. after that, my flow became: agent does work independent review of the diff then I read whatever the agent claimed about its own progress with appropriate skepticism. completely changed the trust dynamic. net takeaway after a full week agents A and B: kept them. parallel work on independent features is real when the agents are well-scoped. agent C: stayed gaslit. switched it out for a different model and the issue got better but didn’t fully go away. I think there’s a real category problem here some agents are way more confident in their own fabrications than others and ‘confidence + capability’ without verification is a bad combo. bigger lesson: parallel agents amplify whatever review process you already had. if your review was tight, you’ll ship 2-3x more good code. if your review was loose, you’ll ship 2-3x more debt. there’s no middle outcome. tl;dr: ran 3 ai agents in parallel for a week using git worktrees. two were great. third confidently lied about test results, then revised history when caught. the unlock wasn’t picking better agents. it was building a verification layer that didn’t depend on what the agents told me about themselves. anyone else running multi-agent setups hit this? is there a pattern people are using to keep agents honest, or is ‘trust nothing they tell you about their own work’ actual answer? submitted by /u/thewritingwallah
Originally posted by u/thewritingwallah on r/ClaudeCode