How do I run several projects through one crew at the same time?

Tares runs every project you hand it through one crew, started once with tares factory crew up. The orchestrator starts builders for each project, one per milestone and repo. One reviewer checks every pull request, and the Crew page shows each project’s progress and builders. You talk only to the orchestrator, and while one project waits for you, the others carry on.

How it works

The software factory for Claude Code is one crew of Claude Code sessions on your machine, and it serves all your projects together:

• Orchestrator: one session for all projects. It hands out work, answers the other sessions and brings you what needs you. It is the only session you talk to.
• Reviewer: one session that reviews every pull request, from every project, to the same fixed bar and posts its verdict on the pull request.
• Builders: started by the orchestrator for each project, one per milestone and repo, up to the number you allow. Each takes a ticket, works on its own branch, opens a pull request and merges it once the reviewer passes it and CI is green.
• Releaser: only if you ask for one. It tags and deploys. Without it, tickets end at merged on main.

Tares keeps the record: each project’s plan, tickets and stages, every review, the assumptions the crew made, the questions it asked you and your answers. Because the record lives on Tares and not in the sessions, a crew that restarts carries on where it stopped, for every project.

Questions from all projects reach you in the orchestrator’s session, one at a time, each with a recommendation. If one project is waiting for an answer, the crew keeps working on the others.

Set it up

You bring the crew up once, then plan and hand over as many projects as you like. The full walkthrough is on Get started.

1. Check what you need: Claude Code signed in on a plan that allows background sessions, gh signed in with write access to your repos, plus git, jq and curl. The crew uses your Claude Code login, so there is no separate model API key.

2. Install the CLI with uv tool install tares or brew install glassflow/tap/tares. Start Tares with tares up, or sign in to Tares Cloud with tares login. In a second terminal, start the MCP endpoint every crew session shares with tares mcp using the streamable-http transport.

3. Give Tares access to GitHub, so it can read the pull request, CI and merge state of every ticket. On Tares Cloud, choose Connect GitHub in your workspace settings. On a local Tares, add a token or App under Settings > GitHub.

4. Bring up the crew once. The first run asks how far the crew may go: whether it merges on its own after review and green CI or waits for your yes, whether it releases, and how many builders run at once. That builder limit is what caps the work running across all projects.

   tares factory crew up

5. Plan each project. Run the spec command in the repo a project builds on, or in a folder that holds its repos, and add a short description of what you want to build. Repeat it for every project. Each run interviews you and writes a Tares project with a spec, milestones, tickets and an AGENTS.md. At the end, say yes to hand it to the crew.

   tares factory spec

6. Answer questions from every project in one place:

   tares factory crew attach

   Attach the orchestrator station, which is the session you talk to.

7. Follow progress on the Crew page of the Tares console, at http://127.0.0.1:8787/crew on a local Tares. From the terminal, tares factory projects lists every project handed to the crew with its progress, builders and repos, and tares factory crew status gives a line per project.

What you get

• One crew working on all your projects at the same time, with no second crew to start.
• A Crew page that shows the question waiting for you at the top, then the stations, each open project with its own builders, and the pull requests waiting for review.
• One reviewer holding every pull request, in every project, to the same bar.
• One place for questions. The orchestrator brings them to you one at a time, so you do not watch a terminal per project.
• A per-project merge gate. A single project can wait for your yes before every merge, even when the rest of the crew merges on its own.
• A written record of every choice the crew made on its own, so you check it at the end of each milestone instead of during every step.
• A crew that picks up where it stopped after a restart, because Tares holds the projects, tickets and answers.

When something else fits

• If one small project is all you have, tares factory session lets you build it in your own Claude Code session on Tares, without the crew. It also offers to take over a project the crew has, and the crew stops when you say yes.
• The software factory is built for solo developers and very small teams. It runs on one machine, on your own Claude Code login and your own GitHub repos.

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