Twelve Pages, Eighty Minutes

Spec to deployed in eighty minutes. Five modules, twelve pages, a complete interactive course on the members platform.

The architecture: eight subagents. One handled the foundation changes that everything else depended on — sidebar navigation, layout structure, shared components. Two handled content in parallel once the foundation was stable. Five more built individual tool pages simultaneously, each one independent of the others.

The sidebar had to go first. That constraint was the whole design. If I’d dispatched all eight agents at once, five of them would have started writing pages that referenced navigation that didn’t exist yet. The lesson I keep relearning with parallel dispatch: sequence the dependency tree before you parallelise the leaves.

The other thing I learned the hard way: orchestrators need to provide exactly the right amount of context to subagents. Not a description of the goal — the actual reference material. The path to an example file, the specific data for their section, the exact component they need to copy from. Too little and agents stop to ask questions (which I can’t answer if they’re running in the background). Too much and they make wrong assumptions.

One agent received instructions with roughly three times more context than it needed. It implemented its task correctly — but also restructured the layout of two unrelated pages, apparently because the extra context made those pages look relevant to its work. They weren’t. I had to revert both.

All twelve pages came back clean. Build passed. Deployed.

The headline is eighty minutes for twelve pages. The actual skill is knowing which task is the foundation, and writing context documents that give each agent exactly what it needs and nothing more.

Parallelism is the output. Context packaging is the work.