How many Claude Code sessions does a crew need for framework migrations?

Tares runs a crew of at least three Claude Code sessions for a framework migration: an orchestrator, a reviewer and one builder. Builders are one per milestone and repo, so the count grows with the shape of your migration. A small migration can run in a single session of your own with tares factory session, without a crew. The Get started page has the full setup.

How it works

A crew in Tares is made of these Claude Code sessions, all running in the background on your machine:

• Orchestrator: hands out work, answers the others and brings you what needs you. It is the only session you talk to.
• Reviewer: reviews every pull request to a fixed bar and posts its verdict on the pull request.
• Builders: one per milestone and repo of a project, started by the orchestrator. 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.

So the orchestrator and the reviewer are always there, and the builders depend on your plan. A migration planned as one milestone in one repo needs one builder, three sessions in all. A migration planned as several milestones, or spread over several repos, gets a builder for each milestone and repo. The orchestrator starts them up to the number of builders you allow, so you set the ceiling in the crew settings.

Tares keeps the plan, the tickets and their stages, every review and your answers. The sessions come and go, and a crew that restarts carries on where it stopped.

Set it up

1. Check that Claude Code is signed in, that gh is signed in with write access to the repos the crew works in, and that git, jq and curl are installed.

gh auth login

2. Install the CLI and start Tares locally.

uv tool install tares     # or: brew install glassflow/tap/tares
tares up

3. In a second terminal, start the MCP endpoint every crew session shares. On Tares Cloud, run tares login instead of tares up and skip this step, because there is no MCP endpoint to start.

tares mcp --transport streamable-http

4. Give Tares access to GitHub, under Settings > GitHub for a local Tares or with Connect GitHub on Tares Cloud. Tares reads the pull request, CI and merge state of every ticket itself.

5. Bring up the crew. The first run asks how many builders may run at once, whether the crew merges on its own after review and green CI, whether it releases, and whether a second model checks every commit.

tares factory crew up

6. Plan the migration from the repo it applies to, or from a folder that holds its repos. Replace the quoted text with what you want to build, in this case your migration. The plan comes out as milestones with acceptance checks and tickets, and the milestones and repos you plan set how many builders the crew starts.

tares factory spec "what you want to build"

7. Answer the crew’s questions in the orchestrator’s session, and check who is running.

tares factory crew attach orchestrator
tares factory crew status

What you get

• A session count that follows your plan: two fixed sessions plus one builder per milestone and repo, and a releaser only if you ask.
• Every pull request held to the same review bar before it merges, whatever the number of builders.
• One place to talk. Questions from every project reach you in the orchestrator, one at a time, each with a recommendation.
• A Crew page in the Tares console that shows each project’s progress, its builders and the pull requests waiting for review.
• A record on Tares of the plan, the tickets, the reviews, the assumptions the crew made and your answers, so a restart does not lose the thread.
• Room for more work. One crew serves as many projects as you hand it, at the same time.

When something else fits

• For a small migration, skip the crew and work in one Claude Code session on Tares with tares factory session. It plans a small project and builds it right there, and your shared AGENTS.md and memory still apply.
• If a session’s plan turns out big, it offers the full spec and the hand-over to the crew instead.
• If the crew already has the project, tares factory session asks whether to take it over. Say yes and the crew stops, and the session carries on from the builders’ branches and pull requests.

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