Ran into a story last week from someone using claude code for the “night shift” pattern. they plan work before bed, wake up to finished output. that morning, they woke up to a token bill 5x what they expected and a codebase that looked done but had a constraint dropped somewhere in a sub-agent handoff. no errors fired. the run technically succeeded. I’ve been talking to a few people about this exact failure shape and it shows up in different ways depending on the setup. Sub-agents are looping silently. planner spawns coder spawns reviewer, reviewer kicks back to planner, the cycle goes for 3 hours and burns 14k tokens before anyone notices. MCP server retry storms. your agent calls a slow or partially broken mcp server. agent decides “let me try a different approach” and calls again. forty calls later you’ve burned the day’s budget on what should have been one invocation. Context drift across handoffs. agent A summarizes for agent B, drops a constraint, agent B violates it, you don’t catch it until you read the diff. doesn’t fail loudly, just produces work that looks fine but isn’t. The token caps you set on the wrong layer. max iterations on the top-level agent but each sub-agent has its own loop. one fans out, another loops, the bill is 5x what you expected. Curious what people are running into. what’s the last claude code multi-agent run that surprised you, the bill, the output, or how long it took? If you do the night shift pattern, has anything quietly gone wrong overnight and how did you find out, the bill, the morning diff, an unfinished todo? what do you wish claude code surfaced live that it doesn’t today? submitted by /u/Minimum-Ad5185
Originally posted by u/Minimum-Ad5185 on r/ClaudeCode