Orchestrators that are less bloated than Gas Town

I've used claude code for a few hours a day during the past few months now. I feel like I'm starting to hit the limits of single-claude code workflows, but I run into some problems with running multiple parallel instances in tmux:

• When working in the same file the agents accidentally overwrite each other's files, introducing bugs
• If you have for example 3-4 small changes I want to make I currently write small markdown "issue" files, but it's a chore having to wait for a feature to be done and then manually go to each window and tell the agent to start working on a feature
• If working with code, since each agent works incrementally, the codebase is often in an inconsistent state, so the agents often can't run tests/linting until the other agents have finished.

I'm looking at options to solve these issues.

I've looked at https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown which seems very interesting, and it's pretty much exactly the workflow I'm interested in. But it's an extremely complex, bloated and constantly changing system consisting of like 300k LoC of Go code.

It does however seem seem like some of the core orchestration principles in gas towns are solid:

• You talk (in natural language) to a single agent that files issues, tracks progress for you, spawns new agents (equiv. to the Gas Town Mayor) and assigns them work, killing them after they're done.
• Issues are tracked via a tool that all agents know about and can use (Gas Town uses beads, a commandline tool to track issues)
• Since worker agents (Gas Town Polecats) quickly hit their context window, you need to consistently kill them, but then you must bootstrap new workers with the knowledge they need to get to work.
• Each worker agent works in their own git worktree (so the only inconsistent codebases are their own)
• The worker outputs PRs, that are automatically merged one at a time by an agent (Gas Town Refinery) or human.

(tl;dr: you talk to one agent, that agent creates ticket and spawns workers, workers work in their own separate git worktree to produce PRs then die, the PRs are merged by you or another agent)

Can anyone recommend any agentic workflows that work a bit like this, that's a bit less bloate than gas town?

Just for fun I tried implementing a mini-version of gas town myself using beads_rust and a roles section in CLAUDE.md and it kinda works but the workers get stuck at times.

It would also be nice to know if there are any other subreddits for these kind of questions.