pasrom/dotclaude/delegating-to-claude-accounts

Delegating to Claude Code accounts

Overview

Roman runs several Claude Code accounts on one Mac. Each is a fully separate profile selected by CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR (own auth, settings, MCP, history), invoked through a wrapper on PATH. To use another account from a session, call its wrapper headless with `-p` — it spawns an independent claude process under that subscription and prints the answer.

Accounts

claude-work / claude-acc2 are one-line shell wrappers in ~/.local/bin (CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR=~/.claude-… exec claude "$@"). The science ones are a compiled launcher symlinked from ~/.claude-science/bin/.

Quick reference

# One-shot answer under the work account. ALWAYS -p, ALWAYS a timeout.
timeout 180 claude-work -p "your prompt"
 
# Structured output (session_id, total_cost_usd, usage):
timeout 180 claude-work -p "your prompt" --output-format json
 
# The delegated task needs tools? -p refuses tool use by default. Either
# pipe the data in and avoid tools entirely...
git log --oneline -50 | timeout 180 claude-acc2 -p "Summarize this git log"
# ...or grant exactly what it needs:
timeout 180 claude-work -p "summarize the git log" --allowedTools "Bash(git log:*)"

Gotchas

• `-p` is mandatory. Without it the wrapper opens the interactive TUI and

the Bash tool hangs until timeout. Always add timeout.

• Tool permissions block headless. A bare claude-work -p cannot run

Bash/Edit/etc. — it will refuse. Pipe data in, or pass --allowedTools "…" / --permission-mode acceptEdits (or bypassPermissions for full trust).

• Billing is per account. Since 2026-06-15, headless -p spends that

account's separate monthly headless credit pool (then full API rates), not its interactive 5h/7d subscription quota. So delegating does not dodge an interactive rate limit; it spreads the per-account headless pool.

• Wrapper vs. alias. The ~/.local/bin/claude-work script works in the

non-interactive Bash tool; the zsh alias does not. If a wrapper isn't found (or a cmux/PATH shim intercepts claude), fall back to the explicit form: CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR=~/.claude-work claude -p "…".

• Trust dialog on a new workspace. First use of another profile in a repo

warns "workspace not trusted" and ignores that profile's permissions.allow. Fix: set projects["<repo-dir>"].hasTrustDialogAccepted = true in that profile's .claude.json (e.g. ~/.claude-acc2/.claude.json), or run claude-acc2 interactively once and accept.

• No cheap attribution. You can't confirm which account answered without

spending a token on it; trust the config dir you selected.

When NOT to use

• Same-account parallelism / subtasks → use the Agent tool (subagents).

It shares context, spends no extra subscription, and needs no separate auth.

• Reach for account delegation only to (a) use a different subscription's

quota, or (b) genuinely isolate auth/config/MCP.