How do you run multiple Claude Code agents at once?

You run multiple Claude Code agents by asking for them in plain words: tell Claude to do the job "in parallel using separate subagents," one per piece, and it starts them side by side and stitches the answers together at the end. That's the wording straight from Claude Code's subagents docs, and it works best when the pieces don't depend on each other, like sorting ten leads where each one stands on its own. Each subagent gets its own fresh memory, its own instructions and only the tools you gave it, and only its summary comes back to your main chat.

So there are two things I'd watch. First, Claude Code runs up to 20 subagents at once by default, and past that you get a "Concurrent subagent limit reached" error, so a big job goes in batches. Second, every one of them spends your plan's usage while it runs, and all their answers land back in your main chat, so ten at once burns through it a lot faster than one. And if you don't know up front how to split the job, let Claude be the boss and make it show you the plan first. My guide to setting up all seven Claude agent types has the prompts for both.