How many agents can work at the same time, and what does that cost?

Several fronts at once

A front is one running task: one fresh agent session, in one pane. The queue opens as many as you allow and as the lanes permit.

The ceiling

Eight fronts at once. The limit is in the contract, not in the layout — the grid has no upper bound on panes. Eight is where the cost to your machine starts to matter: each front is a CLI process with its own context, and they run 150–250 MB each. Eight fronts is one to two gigabytes of resident memory before your own build tools ask for any.

You choose the number when you start the queue. Three is a good first number: enough to see parallelism happen, few enough to read.

Fronts are panes, always

Every front appears as a pane in a group, one per front. This is not a display preference — a front that does not fit on the screen would be automation editing your repository without showing you, and that is the thing Muster exists not to be.

You can watch any front, type into it, or interrupt it. Interrupting a front does not stop the queue.

Pausing

Pause stops the queue from opening new fronts. It does not kill the ones in flight — they finish, their acceptance commands run, and their verdicts land. That is deliberate: killing a working agent mid-edit leaves the repository in a state nobody asked for.

What ends a run

The queue stops on its own and says why:

• there is nothing left it can admit;
• the project folder disappeared;
• three tasks failed in a row.

The third is the one that saves you. Three consecutive failures usually means something environmental — a broken test command, a missing dependency, an expired credential — and running twenty more tasks into it would burn tokens producing twenty identical blocks.

Next

When parallel turns serial, for when you allowed eight fronts and got one.