Background Context
We’re building Pochi, a full-stack AI teammate that can handle all your coding tasks and think, communicate, and work like a real engineer. One of our recent feature requests involved releasing Parallel agents.
Most teams rarely work on a single task at a time. You might be partway through a feature when a bug report arrives, someone needs a small refactor reviewed, or a documentation fix is pending.
So you end up switching branches, stashing and popping changes, resetting your workspace, and trying to hold the original task in your head. This is context switching, and it’s one of the biggest hidden costs in software development.
Parallel Agents were introduced to remove this cost. They are not new, but the way most tools implement them still felt off. Our own experience with Cursor / Github Copilot and the likes showcased that these tools operate as parallel agents inside a single editor tab. So in essence, you’re effectively still working in one tab at a time: switching tasks means switching the state of the same working directory and the same conversation.
This is the part that matters. When the underlying repo state is shared, “parallel tasks” are still serial in practice.
The Design Question We Asked
What if multiple agents could work on the same codebase without sharing the same working directory?
The answer already exists in Git: git worktree add path branch. A worktree gives you a second checked-out working directory backed by the same .git repository.
So instead of trying to simulate “parallel tasks” in one tab, if we made each agent correspond to its own worktree, we could expose these worktrees directly inside VS Code (Source Control + Pochi tabs). That means no manual git worktree management is required as each agent simply gets its own branch, filesystem, and local execution context.
Parallel agents only feel parallel when the filesystem is parallel.
What We Built
Based on that, we built Parallel Agents in Pochi that use separate Git worktrees, so that each task has its own working directory, branch, chat history, and terminal environment. This means that each task state stays isolated.
A great example would be to run the same task with different models to pick the best response. Won’t that be a faster and much better experience - all within the same timeframe?
From a UX standpoint, the important bit is how it surfaces in the editor: each agent is a separate tab, each tab bound to its own worktree. You can diff, commit, discard, or merge worktrees independently. You can run two model-generated solutions side-by-side and compare outcomes without the branches stepping on each other.
Imagine if you’ve to run the same task with different models to pick the best response. Won’t a multi tab approach be a faster and much better experience - all within the same timeframe?
While under the hood it’s git worktrees with orchestration that binds each worktree to its own agent state.
How to use?
You can create a worktree from the Pochi sidebar or from the Source Control panel in VS Code. Once a worktree exists, starting a task in that worktree opens it as its own tab in Pochi.
You can switch tabs to switch tasks. Each tab reflects a complete development context: code, chat, history, and tooling.
When a task is complete, you can view a diff of that worktree against the main branch and create a PR. Or you can discard it entirely.
The point is that the work is isolated, so it doesn’t interfere with anything that is in progress. Additionally, you can also open an integrated terminal directly inside each task’s worktree.
When to use Parallel Agents
Parallel Agents are most useful when you want to avoid breaking focus on ongoing work: quick bugfixes during feature development, long-running refactors that you want to keep separate, documentation changes that happen alongside coding, or letting an AI assistant explore broader changes in a sandbox.
On the other hand, if a change is meant to be reviewed and merged as a single unit, keeping it on one branch remains simpler.
You can refer the full documentation here: https://docs.getpochi.com/parallel-agents/
In case you’d like to give Pochi a try, you can install the extension here.
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