Originally published at vinpatel.com
By the end of this you'll know how to stand up a working AI "office" with Munder Difflin's agent harness — clones assigned roles, a manager routing their work between them.
Multi-agent orchestration is having a real moment right now. Research teams are building environments specifically to train agents that have to work together instead of alone, and startups are pitching AI "teammates" that claim to replicate entire research workflows without a human in the loop. Munder Difflin, which surfaced on Hacker News, is the build-it-yourself version of that same idea: a harness for running several instances of a model as if they were coworkers, each with a job title, a queue, and a manager deciding who does what.
Here's how you actually stand one up.
- Pick your base model. The harness treats the LLM as interchangeable, so whatever you can hit through an API becomes the "employee."
- Draw the org chart first, on paper. Decide how many clones you need and what each one owns before you write a single prompt.
- Write a short brief per clone. What it owns, what it can't touch, and who it hands off to when it's done.
- Stand up the manager. One agent, or you, reviewing outputs and routing tasks between the others.
- Run it against a task you'd actually delegate to a hire, not a toy example.
- Watch the handoffs, not the outputs. That's where these harnesses actually fail.
A role brief for one clone looks roughly like this:
role: support_clone
owns: inbound customer questions
escalates_to: manager
tools: [search_kb, draft_reply]
constraints: never send without manager approval
The gotcha: clones don't know what they don't know about each other. Skip the explicit handoff protocol and two agents will cheerfully duplicate the same task, or both assume the other one is handling it, and you won't find out until it just never got done. That routing gap is exactly the problem full agentic development pipelines are trying to design around before anyone hands them real production work. And if a clone keeps underperforming inside the harness, check the guardrails before you blame the model — tightening the constraints around a struggling open model can fix agentic performance faster than swapping it out.
Munder Difflin's real test isn't whether you can spin up the clones. It's whether the manager layer holds once two of them disagree about who owns the ticket.
Subscribe at vinpatel.com/subscribe/ for one AI story like this a day, before it hits your feed.
