How to run five Claude Code sessions at once without losing one

Claude Code is happy to run in five terminals at the same time. Your Mac is happy too. The thing that breaks is you: five tabs, five jobs, and no way to see which one is waiting for an answer, which one finished twenty minutes ago, and which one has quietly gone off the rails.

This post is the setup we use ourselves, where five is a quiet day and ten to twenty is normal. It works with plain Terminal and tmux if you insist, and it is the reason adhdTerminal exists.

One session per folder, always

Claude Code keeps its conversation history per working directory. Start a session in the folder you want it to touch, and only that folder. Two sessions in the same folder share history in confusing ways and will trip over each other's edits.

Name the folder after the job if the project does not already do it. A folder called billing-webhook-fix is a better label than a tab that says zsh.

Give every session a one-line brief

The first message decides how useful the session will be for the next hour. State the goal, the definition of done, and what the agent may not touch. Then stop typing and let it work.

A session that has a clear brief can be left alone. A session that got a vague one will ask you questions every three minutes, and five of those is a day gone.

Make status visible without clicking

This is the part tabs cannot do. You need to see at a glance: is it working, is it waiting for me, or is it done. In tmux you can get halfway there with a status line per pane. In adhdTerminal each tile shows a pulse while working, a prompt while waiting, and its last results in the feed row when done.

Whatever tool you use, the test is simple: can you tell the state of every tile from across the room, whether there are five or twenty.

Let the session report, not you

Tell the agent to summarise what it did in two lines when it finishes. Claude Code will do this if asked in the brief. On the wall it posts those lines to the tile itself, so the summary sits next to the session instead of buried in scrollback.

Resume, do not restart

When you come back tomorrow, do not open a fresh session. Use the resume option so the agent still knows what it decided yesterday. On the wall this is automatic: every tile reopens in place and continues the same conversation.