Orca review: Sonicmove engineer nohe finds parallel agent work seamless

nohe's switch was driven less by a feature wishlist than by an accident that kept recurring: with implementation and review running in parallel, branches under active work would sometimes get switched out from under him. About a month before writing, he moved to Orca, a tool built on the premise that agents, not humans, do the writing.

The most-cited benefit in the review is not the parallel execution itself but the removal of setup friction. nohe had known about git worktree for a long time, yet avoided it because every new worktree needs its own .env, vendor/, and node_modules/, plus cleanup afterward. With .worktreeinclude and orca.yaml, that chore disappears, and he says worktree use finally became a daily habit.

Other details shape the picture of what daily use looks like. Orca's Design Mode lets you click an element in the built-in browser and attach a comment, and in the demo the agent turned gap-0.5 into gap-3 and pushed the fix without any verbal back-and-forth. Token consumption is managed by delegating work to subagents, clearing or compacting context, and watching usage in the status bar. The rough edges he flags — Laravel logins overwriting each other across workspaces because cookies ignore ports, and rising memory use — are noted as things to work around rather than dealbreakers.