Say "use a workflow" to fan a huge task across subagents
Add the words "use a workflow" to a prompt and Claude writes a JavaScript orchestration script that runs subagents in the background, keeping only the final answer in your context.
The problem
Tasks that need more agents than one conversation can coordinate — a 500-file migration, a repo-wide audit — flood your context window with per-agent chatter and stall the session.
The hack
Prefix a large task with "use a workflow" (or the keyword `ultracode`). Claude writes and runs a script that holds the loop, the branching and the intermediate results, so your context only receives the final report.
Why it works
Boris Cherny describes this as the productive way to spend test-time compute on tasks too big for one session. Because the plan lives in code rather than in Claude's context, a workflow can also review its own findings adversarially before reporting them.
Setup
1. Describe the task in one sentence and include "use a workflow". 2. Watch progress with `/workflows`, where you can pause, resume or save the run. 3. To make every substantive task in a session a workflow, set `/effort ultracode`. 4. Try the bundled `/deep-research` workflow first if you want to see the shape of a run. 5. Save a workflow you like so you can rerun it as a command.
Prompt
use a workflow to audit every route handler under src/routes/ for missing authentication checks, and adversarially verify each finding before reporting it
Discussion
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