Sometimes one answer is not enough. You want a welcome note, a product description or a reply written a few different ways so you can compare them. The parallel drafts page lets you hand the same brief to several of your own agents at once and read their drafts side by side.
The page says it plainly at the top: nothing is sent until you press Start. Drafts stay private to you, and shared agents cannot take part.
Before you start
- You need at least one agent of your own. If you have none yet, Create an agent walks you through it.
- Each agent you pick needs its own instructions and a supported Claude model.
- Preparing a plan is open to approved owner accounts. If the page refuses the plan and asks for an approved owner account and a supported Claude model, drafting is not open to your account yet. The page itself still opens, and nothing is sent.
Open the page from your agent
Open your agent's own page from your agents list by pressing its name. On that page there is a section called Parallel drafts. Press Open parallel drafts.
The page that opens is headed Parallel drafts. Under the heading, the link Back to followed by your agent's name takes you back to that same agent page.
If your agent page has no Parallel drafts section, the feature is not switched on for your account, and the rest of this guide is ahead of you.
Write the brief and prepare a plan
- Under Choose one to six agents, tick the agents you want to draft. The list shows your own agents, each with its number after its name, so two agents with similar names are easy to tell apart.
- In What should they draft?, write the brief. Say what the piece is, who it is for and anything it must include. Every agent you picked gets exactly this text.
- Press Prepare plan.
Preparing a plan does not start any drafts. The page shows the plan under the heading Plan ready, with your Brief, a Start before time and the Status. It also lists each agent you chose with its model, and it tells you how much of your included use is set aside for the plan. Setting it aside is not a charge.
Read the plan once. If the brief or the agents are wrong, open Prepare a new plan and start again. A plan is not kept waiting for long: if the Start before time passes, the heading reads Plan expired and you prepare a new one.
Start the drafts
Press Start drafts. The heading changes to Draft progress. While the agents work, the Status line reads Drafting, and each agent's line shows its own state. A finished draft reads Done.
The page does not update by itself. Press Refresh progress / saved plan to see the latest. That link is the run's own address, so keep it if you want to come back to the run later.
Completed drafts appear under each agent's line, in the order the agents are listed in your plan.
Cancel or recover a run
- Cancel unstarted drafts stops anything that has not been sent yet. The page then says "Cancellation requested. Work already sent may still finish; no new drafts will start." Agents that had not started read Cancelled.
- Recover queued work appears once a run has started. If the page says some drafts are still waiting to be sent, press it: it sends only the ones that are safe to send.
- If an agent's line reads Did not report back, that draft is not sent again, so nothing is charged twice. Prepare a new plan if you still want it.
- If an agent's line reads Refused, that draft was stopped before anything was sent. Check that agent's access, instructions and model, then prepare a new plan.
Pick the one to keep
When the lines read Done, read the drafts one under the other. There is no button to pick a winner: copy the text you want to keep from its draft and use it wherever it belongs, for example in a reply, on a page or in your agent's instructions. The run's page stays private to you.
A good habit is to change one thing at a time. Keep the same brief and swap the agents, or keep the agents and sharpen the brief, and compare again.