Orca Strator: An Agentic Workflow for Running Many Claude Code Sessions Across Several Seats

Overview

Last week I hit the weekly limit on my Claude seat in the middle of a sprint. I was running about 20 Claude Code sessions on a work project: an orchestrator, lanes building features, checkers testing them, plus sessions for daily tasks and future plans. Extra usage kept the work going, but it is billed at API rates and it was costing a lot. By my own token counts, staying on one seat plus extra usage would come to roughly $9,000 this month. My heaviest day alone, about 4.3 billion tokens, would have been roughly $1,200.

A second Team seat costs $125 a month, so I took a second seat. That fixed the cost and created a new job: two seats, each with its own 5 hour limit and its own weekly limit, and every time one ran out, everything had to move to the other by hand. For each session I had to type /exit, paste a resume command, restart its scheduled jobs, then tell every other session its new address. After one of those moves the orchestrator lost track of which lane was where and how full each one's context was.

Now the second seat's weekly limit is almost full too, so a third seat is next. Three seats used fully are $375 a month, fixed. The same work on one seat plus extra usage would be roughly $15,000 to $20,000 a month. More seats is the obvious answer. The juggling was the real problem, so I built Orca Strator: open source plugins for Claude Code that do the juggling. These cost figures are estimates from claude.com/pricing on 27 October 2026 and my own token counts.

What it does

One line above every prompt shows every seat's 5 hour and weekly usage, and warns once before the seat you are on hits its limit, naming the seat with the most room. /quota lists every seat with its reset times. This part is orca-quota, a small Claude Code mod. Claude Code tells each session how much of its own seat's limits are used; the mod saves that reading to a small file, and every session reads all of them, so each one sees every seat.

A session moves itself to the seat with room. orca-move saves its scheduled jobs, tells the sessions it works with, exits only when the prompt box is empty, and reopens the same conversation in the same terminal tab under the other seat, then brings its scheduled jobs back and sends everyone its new address. The session I built it in moved itself in 9 seconds. The move is one command, /orca-move:switch, or none if you turn auto move on with /quota auto on.

Sessions on different seats can message each other. /peers, from orca-peers, lists every live session on the machine in every seat, with how full its context is and the address to message it. So the orchestrator sees every session's context level and knows who needs a handover.

When a session's context fills up, it writes a handover note and a fresh session picks up the work. orca-fleet holds the roles for this: an orchestrator that keeps the plan, the scheduled jobs and the merge queue, lanes that each build one stream of work, and checkers that verify each merged change once on staging. Each project keeps its own facts and rules in one config file, and merge rights always come from the project's own rules file, never from the plugin.

How it works

Orca Strator is one install that brings in four plugins: orca-peers, orca-quota, orca-move and orca-fleet. Each one also installs and works on its own, and each uses the others when they are there: orca-move uses orca-quota to pick the seat with the most room and orca-peers to find who to tell, and orca-fleet needs orca-peers for addresses and context levels.

A move works between twin accounts: a second Claude login whose config directory shares the first one's projects folder, so resuming a conversation under either login opens the same conversation, while each login keeps its own usage limits. You log in to every seat yourself, once. None of the plugins reads or copies login tokens, and nothing is sent off the machine.

Install

Install it in Claude Code, in every account you use. It needs Claude Code 2.1.310 or later. Moves and handovers open Terminal.app tabs on macOS; other terminals get a line to paste. orca-quota and orca-move each include a small mod, code that runs inside Claude Code, so read the code before you install any mod. Orca Strator is free and open source (MIT) in the claude-plugins marketplace on GitHub.

/plugin marketplace add mutlumehmet/claude-plugins
/plugin install orca-strator@mehmetmutlu
/orca

After installing, type /orca. It checks the setup (the plugins in this account, your accounts and twin accounts, a fleet config in the project), lets you change the settings with buttons (auto move on or off, the warning level) and starts the session in the right role: orchestrator, lane, checker, or just this session. /orca status shows every seat, session and context level on one screen, and /orca help lists every command, so there is nothing to remember. In a project with a fleet config, a new session says so in one line and never starts anything by itself.