To solve this new problem, we built a system called Symphony. Symphony⁠(opens in a new window) is an agent orchestrator that turns a project-management board like Linear into a control plane for coding agents. Every open task gets an agent, agents run continuously, and humans review the results.

This post explains how we created Symphony—resulting in a 500% increase in landed pull requests on some teams—and how to use it to turn your own issue tracker into an always-on agent orchestrator.

Even as they get easier to use, coding agents—whether accessed through web apps or CLI—are still interactive tools.

As the scale of agentic work increased at OpenAI, we found a new kind of burden. Each engineer would open a few Codex sessions, assign tasks, review the output, steer the agent, and repeat. In practice, most people could comfortably manage three to five sessions at a time before context switching became painful. Beyond that, productivity dropped. We'd forget which session was doing what, jump between terminals to nudge agents back on track, and debug long-running tasks that stalled halfway through.