FareedKhan-dev/claude-code-staff-engineer
63 stars · Last commit 2026-04-13
Building a Senior Staff Engineer with Sub-Agent Teams in Claude Code
README preview
# Building a Senior Staff Engineer Agent with Claude Code The difference between a Junior and a Senior engineer isn’t syntax, it’s predictability, risk management, and discipline under pressure. AI agents struggle with exactly this: **they skip reviews, rationalize shortcuts, and ship work they are proud of but nobody actually verified**. [Anthropic shows agents collaborate well](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler) but without structure, more agents just mean more chaos and wasted compute. What you need is what real companies have: **a Staff Engineer orchestrating specialized sub-agents** through a disciplined pipeline from design to deployment, and that is exactly what we are going to build …  *Senior Staff Engineer with teams of sub-agents (Created by [Fareed Khan](https://medium.com/u/b856005e5ecd))* The system works like a real engineering organization with clear separation of responsibilities: * **Discovery & Design**: The Architect asks questions one at a time, explores 2–3 approaches with trade-offs, and produces a design spec committed to git. No code before human approval. * **Planning & Review**: The Tech Lead breaks the spec into 2–5 minute tasks with exact file paths and complete code. A fresh sub-agent audits the plan against the spec to catch gaps and scope creep. * **Execution Engine**: The Manager dispatches a fresh sub-agent per task with isolated context. Stuck agents escalate. Bad work gets terminated and re-dispatched. * **Quality Gates**: Two sequential reviews: spec compliance (right thing?) then code quality (built well?). A verification gate demands fresh terminal output before any completion claim. * **Engineering Discipline**: TDD enforced as iron law. Debugging follows a four-phase forensic process. Root cause tracing goes five levels deep. Skills themselves are pressure-tested against real agents before deployment. In this blog we are going to … > visually walk through each stage of this workflow, build every component step by step from hooks to skills to agents, and see how they work together as a disciplined engineering team using Claude Code.