How We Work: Beads, Conductor, Expert Agents, and Skills
Ryan Snodgrass
This is Part 1 of our How We Work series — short reflections from the SageOx team on the tools, techniques, and mental models behind our workflows.
In a world that's constantly changing, how we work also needs to rapidly evolve. Our CTO, Ryan Snodgrass, talks about having to sharpen his axe frequently, constantly on the lookout for better ways of getting the job done. Consider his thoughts below relevant as of late March 2026.
Beads, Conductor, Expert Agents, and Skills
Transcript
Milkana: Across projects and also within a project when you have multiple agents maybe tackling different parts of the project — what tools do you use or what flows have you set up for yourself around that?
Ryan: To me the absolute biggest unlock you can have with any of these agents is use Steve's Beads, to be honest. When it came out I was a very early adopter. I did a lot of contributions to Beads early on because it was such an instrumental change from the way that Claude and other coding agents used to create a markdown plan.
The problem with the markdown plans is that when you use them for implementing, it has to have the whole plan in memory and then it's marking off the things it's completed. Well, that's not very efficient for its context. There's a huge amount of state. So if you can instead, up front, take that plan and break it down to a series of epics and then all the tasks with lots of details on what needs to be implemented — now you have the plan and you have this kind of breakdown of all the work.
And why that becomes really powerful is when you start thinking about how do you keep a huge swarm of agents fed with work. Well, now you can spin up a number — a swarm, like five agents with Conductor — and say, "You tackle this one epic," which is usually pretty isolated from the others. And you spin up another tab and say, "You do this epic and these tasks." You can do it with many of those and they can all work in parallel and keep track of just the specific tasks they have to work on.
Again, the agents work the best when they have enough context but not too much. So if they're spinning up and they're just taking a single item out of Beads and working on that, then they're very focused and they can not get confused as much. Because when you start doing huge things across the codebase, Claude will just spin and spin sometimes and go in circles. But the more fine-grained the task, it seems to do a better job — and then you merge them back later.
Milkana: Can you talk more about Conductor?
Ryan: As you look at the history of the unlocks — when Opus 4.5 dropped, it was a big thing. Then sub-agents dropping allowed you to have these experts that could tackle specific portions of the problem. But so much you had to manage yourself. You had to manage your tabs. I'd have like 10 tabs across my terminal, each one being different Claude instances, and then remembering, "Oh, tab number four is this and tab number one's this." So the first thing I was doing was color coding them and knowing which ones were operating on production data, which ones were the CLI, which one was the back end. You built your own processes around that.
But what Conductor did — I think it was really smart — was it made some of the things that you naturally want to do, like work trees, super easy. Everything is in a work tree. It names the branches for you automatically. On the tabs on the side, instead of having like number one, two, three, it tells you what it is, what repo it's working in. There's a lot of dashboard things, kind of like on a Tesla — you can see if you're doing a PR, it pops up when there's conflicts or merge issues or when it's ready to be pushed, without you having to go check multiple pages. So you can just quickly move around in Conductor to look at your work.
To me it was a big unlock just to have the work tree support, which you could do manually before. It just ended up being such a hassle managing all these work trees myself that I kind of abandoned it and for a while was just letting Claude stomp on each other and implementing features in the same branch. But Conductor really helped make that smoother and easier because I just want things to get out of my way.
Milkana: So you talked about three big unlocks — Opus 4.5, Beads, and Conductor. Have you had any other unlocks, whether it's tooling or...?
Ryan: Yeah, I think the biggest thing — and I think people still don't use it enough — is expert agents and sub-agents in Claude. The way I create those is if I can start getting into a situation I'm not as familiar with, or even if I am, I need an expert on maybe side projects, things like microprocessor programming. So I need to create an expert in that. I need an expert in release management for open source software. I need an expert in test harness strategies.
Well, you can create these agents. You can go find repositories out there. What I found really effective was actually using ChatGPT, not Claude, to create these. So you go to ChatGPT and say, "Hey, I need an expert in these things, this skill set. I want it to be utilizing the best practices and techniques as of March 2026. And I want this to be a Claude Code prompt that I can just drop into Claude Code to create this."
Milkana: Do you feed it any further context, saying like, "I want this style" or "I want these guidelines"?
Ryan: Yeah, I think on a case-by-case basis, if you have insights in explicitly what you want, that dials in the experts even more. Like in the microprocessor case for the hobby thing, it was this specific circuit board — that's what matters. And you can imagine the same thing in whatever project you're working on. Like, we're using GitLab, so let's have a GitLab expert, not just a Git expert.
And then you take that, you paste it into Claude, and then you have Claude rewrite it. You say, "Rewrite it with the most effective way that Claude will use it as of March 2026." So now you've gotten the insights from ChatGPT, which thinks a little bit differently than Claude, and you have then Claude editing that and merging it to itself. You end up getting something better than either of them could have produced. I think that's an important concept — kind of getting the best of multiple models ends up with something that neither of them could have come up with.
Milkana: How frequently do you update these experts?
Ryan: That's a really interesting question. I tend not to update them very often. But I'll say recently, because at SageOx we have these agents and we share them within the team, I was thinking, "Oh, we really need these customized to each of our repositories or to our team."
So I kind of went through this process and I realized it's just like hiring. It's like, "Hey, I want to hire a test harness expert, but it should be an expert that is based on what our codebase is and what we're trying to build." So I basically told Claude, "I want to hire this agent from out of this other team and I want it customized specifically for this repository." And so it went through and looked at how we structured our architecture and it rewrote it and customized it for that. Which I thought was really interesting — because just like when you're hiring, you might say, "I just want a security engineer." Well, no — I want a security engineer that's really knowledgeable about the specifics of the product we're building. It's very similar in the agent world as it is in the physical world.
Milkana: Can you talk about how and whether you use skills?
Ryan: I do use skills. I probably should do a better job with using skills. I think that's one of the things I realized — if you don't go back and sharpen your axe every two weeks right now, at least, you're getting behind.
I do use skills. I have a lot of my own custom ones built. I've also tried various ones that are out there, which I think are interesting. If you usually embrace their whole process, you can get some amazing things out of the box. I think Gary Tan's launch recently of GStack was a good example of that — you can really embrace that. But you can come up with your own too, based on your workflow.
So one of the things I did recently was I felt like my skills were getting a little out of date, and I was often doing stuff manually. So I said, "Go look at all my Claude sessions for the last month across all my projects. What are the really key things that I should take away from what I'm doing, and new skills I should create based on that?" Because clearly I've unlocked or figured some things out, but I haven't really taken the time to sharpen my axe and sit back and think, "Oh, I really need this specific skill." And it did a fantastic job of building a new toolkit for myself.
That's a compounding thing. Over time, you're going to keep doing it — "Hey, based on the things I did last couple weeks, update my skills." And that could be because you've brought in GStack or other things and you're starting to use those in a certain way. So your other skills might need to be tweaked.
We'll be sharing more of what we're learning as we go. Expect other interviews and takeaways. Drop us a note if you'd like a specific topic covered: feedback@sageox.ai.