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ShinyLeftPad 10 hours ago [-]
> A native home for Claude Code, Codex and every coding agent. Every pixel is a file your agent can change. Close it, they keep working.
First two sentences give zero information what it does. Third one is useful but i think many harnesses do it?
Continuing:
> A new kind of agent workspace. Native and terminal first, with nothing between you and your agents. Every part of it is a plain folder your agent can rewrite, and every agent keeps running when the window is gone.
Okay, more of the same. Let's press on.
> Your agents run agents.
And hear back.
> An agent hands work to helpers and keeps going. When they finish, their reports land in its input. No copy-paste between windows: herdr-core carries the messages.
Are there modern harnesses that don't do subagents/subthreads/whatever the same way?
---
There are some interesting bits but the vibed copy is for me offputting and a sign even the author might not understand what he made.
gb2d_hn 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah that copy is pretty bad. My understanding (someone correct me if I'm wrong), but the herdr native app is an improvement over the existing TUI multiplexer, with a new API for facilitating comms between agents. Herdr is really useful if you've not tried it. I'll be giving this a go (I hadn't really been using agent comms between panes anyway, more just for workspace navigation). Seems you can think of herdr as a 'harness for your harnesses'!
thomasmurph 9 hours ago [-]
What's useful about Herdr compared to tmux and claude code or codex's built in sub-agents?
xionon 9 hours ago [-]
I can't speak to the GUI, just the TUI compared to tmux.
herdr is very flexible, but it shines when you are working with multiple projects, with multiple worktrees, and multiple agents within those projects.
1. herdr uses workspaces to help organize tabs. Conceptually, a workspace probably maps to a project, but it doesn't have to.
2. herdr has native worktree support, and can create a nested workspace per worktree with a keyboard or CLI command. It can check out worktrees for you
3. herdr identifies agents across tabs and workspaces and pulls them out into an extra navigational pane. It shows the status of those agents (e.g. idle, working, waiting, done), and can play a sound when they change state. This helps you track multiple agents across multiple projects and quickly switch to them when they need help without needing to remember "claude is running in space 2, tab 3"
4. herdr integrates with your agents, which can control herdr's UI and rename tabs based on their status.
5. All this is scriptable via the herdr CLI, and agents are very good at it. But it also has full mouse support, if you're new to multiplexers its very easy to start interacting with it.
malte_querier 8 hours ago [-]
I usually keep one tmux session per Python worktree, with a local Postgres test container in another pane. The status view sounds useful here; does Herdr detect waiting via agent hooks or infer it from terminal output?
May depend on harness, but for claude/codex its currently inferred from terminal output.
alepar 5 hours ago [-]
> What's useful about Herdr compared to tmux and claude code or codex's built in sub-agents?
Agent status detection. Single view over local and remote agents. /herdr skill that lets agents list other agents, peek into their panes, send keys (yes, you can make a lot of it work with tmux and some elbow grease, but herdr provides nice cli/api for it and works out of the box) including to remote ones.
In my mental model, subagents are also different from top level agents in tabs: subagents are only great as temporary workers you never want to interact with.
kakugawa 5 hours ago [-]
It also lets you message between Claude Code and Codex sessions. If you're using Claude Code, their built-in messaging system only can see/message other Claude Code sessions (for obv reasons).
This is an unlock, because these companies will (prob) never build this feature.
tokyovigilante 2 hours ago [-]
The automated session resume/workspace restore after restart etc is quite nice, and copy/paste is much better than tmux.
s08148692 3 hours ago [-]
For me the biggest thing is subagents are harness agnostic
I used to hit usage walls with CC/Codex harness using native subagents
With herdr I delegate some work to another herdr pane and it runs Claude code, codex, opencode, pi, whatever model is appropriate and has usage
hermannbjorgvin 6 hours ago [-]
If you prefer tmux orchestration you could give my plugin a try.
It's just a few bash scripts enabling agents to message each other. Works with the desktop apps as well so you could have a Codex or Claude desktop app orchestrate tmux sessions.
I think i built something similar after herdr was released but i can say the reason is at least
tmux is definitely usable but moving between workspaces/repos can be annoying if youre managing mahy many things at once. and difficult to organize. more over having agents manage other agents via tmux can lead to garbled input/output
i havent used codex. claude subagents i think arent the right comparison - the closer comparison would be claude managed agents. but i imagine one reason herdr might be better would be that you’re not stuck in the anthropic ecosystem
code51 9 hours ago [-]
I'm also curious, if you just ask Codex, Claude etc already do subagent management on their own, and if instructed, can certainly set up a structured communication system for the group. Why these Herdr, Pi etc products on top?
Is Codex, Claude Code mismanaging when no tokens left? Or any other specific reason?
Zambyte 8 hours ago [-]
> Codex, Claude etc already do subagent management on their own
What about together? Can you reasonably do agent to agent interactions across harnesses? herdr makes that easy.
One of my favorite reasons for using herdr is what I'll call "everything is a pane". Running a new agent? Runs in a herdr pane. sshing into a system? Runs in a herdr pane. Anything that runs in a herdr pane, your agents can interact with. I will often do things like ssh into a system in one pane, and then ask pi in another pane to help me do diagnostics on that system. It never has to try to ssh in directly in the harness with my credentials, it just sends keyboard input to the pane, and reads the content of the pane. I can watch the interactive session as it goes by.
Another workflow that I have sometimes is I'll kick off some work in an agent, and instead of making a new sub agent, I'll actually make a new parent agent if I get worried that it's going down an unnecessary rabbit hole. I'll tell the new agent something like "periodically watch the agent in pane X, it is working on Y but I am concerned that it is losing track of its tasking. Periodically review what it's doing, and make sure it doesn't go off the rails. If it does seem to be going off the rails, give it guidance to bring it back on track" and that seems to have helped.
kelvinjps10 2 hours ago [-]
Subagent spends more tokens. It can be just separate sessions, just a new codex or claude session it doesn't have to be subagents that have to coordinate
vehemenz 6 hours ago [-]
Herdr doesn't force any particular workflow, it's just a way to organize terminal sessions with built-in agent awareness
breckenedge 9 hours ago [-]
It adds some abstractions and a plugin architecture for extensions. I checked it out but ended up not using it. I run my own harness of harnesses over tmux centered around tasks rather than sessions.
norman784 9 hours ago [-]
I suppose it is just the convenience of having an opinionated app that works with agents out of the box, tmux could be more powerful but similar to vim vs vscode, you need to tune it in.
vehemenz 6 hours ago [-]
Compared to the usual agent manager guis, it's not even that opinionated.
the_real_cher 9 hours ago [-]
My question also!
gb2d_hn 7 hours ago [-]
Had a play with the native app - it's a complete new set of keyboard shortcuts from the TUI. Don't really see the advantage.
crefiz 2 hours ago [-]
Quite popular theses days, I imagine is just another competitor in the same field as T3[1]
It does read a bit like Claude was wondering around homeless in a foreign land and now has a native home. Good for him I suppose, immigration is not a fun process these days.
ShinyLeftPad 9 hours ago [-]
It does sound like that now that I think about it.
ctolsen 8 hours ago [-]
> Are there modern harnesses that don't do subagents/subthreads/whatever the same way?
At the end of the day it's a UX question. I could do the same as this (I use Paseo, similar thing, less obviously vibed copy in the docs if that helps...) with a bunch of terminal tabs and pi, and maybe some skills and scripts to help out, but it's a pain to manage.
DonHopkins 7 hours ago [-]
> A new kind of agent workspace. Native and terminal first, with nothing between you and your agents. Every part of it is a plain folder your agent can rewrite, and every agent keeps running when the window is gone.
They're unironically echoing the infamously iconic 1980 Calvin Klein jeans commercial starring a perversely sexualized underaged 15-year-old girl:
"You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." -Brooke Shields
Except in this case, the romanticized "nothing" between you and your autonomous agents is a massive, multi-layered stack of legacy Unix abstractions, sockets, remote procedure calls, historic terminal emulators, escape codes, pseudo-tty device drivers, and modern infrastructure slop.
The reality of what is actually sitting between you and your agents:
- A herdr-core background daemon handling JSON-RPC IPC messages.
- A crates/ghostty-sys Rust FFI layer binding against libghostty-vt.
- A hardware-accelerated GPU rendering pipeline drawing terminal cell glyphs.
- A legacy Unix PTY subsystem providing master/slave pairs and terminal line discipline.
- An ancient mountain of VT100/ANSI escape codes and termios settings, with resize requests traveling through IPC and SIGWINCH signals notifying Unix terminal applications.
- A structured agent-status protocol carried by yet another terminal escape sequence, OSC 7501, then exposed through JSON-RPC.
"Nothing" says unfiltered, raw human intimacy quite like reading output from a pseudo-terminal file descriptor and watching \x1b[31m error logs cascade through an SSH pipeline and "pseudo" TTY device drivers.
Wrapping this tech in branding that sounds like a sultry, pseudo-erotic pitch is peak HBO Silicon Valley. TTY literally stands for teletype. We are supposedly building the frontier of autonomous artificial intelligence, yet our cutting-edge orchestration layer still routes interaction through abstractions inherited from noisy, electromechanical printing telegraphs of the 1960s. It's not a "native home for your displaced AI souls" -- it's an over-engineered wrapper shackled to the physical heritage of paper rolls and mechanical carriage-return timing: 110-baud Teletypes, separate carriage-return and line-feed operations, and terminal null padding conventions devised to give machinery time to move before the next character printed.
I switched to herdr this year after a decade of using tmux, and I haven't looked back since. Herdr is wonderful, not only because of the coding agent integrations, but also because it uses libghostty under the hood. So no terminal-emulator-inside-another-terminal-emulator shenanigans.
If you prefer GUIs, I can recommend herdr-gpui which connects to a herdr daemon. It has a bunch of goodies like remote phone pairing, and a built-in browser integration to send screenshots and notes to coding agents.
I've been using Zellij a long time and considered using Herdr, but the VC funding aspect scares me. I don't want to invest a bunch of time in a tool that's going to treat me as a product.
blurbleblurble 14 hours ago [-]
It's such a good experience. Try it out, later we fork if they pull anything funny.
skinfaxi 18 hours ago [-]
It's open source so if that changes you can always fork? I already have some personalizations accruing on my fork.
CraigJPerry 12 hours ago [-]
Same, but the cost of maintaining a fork fell through the floor in recent years. If a decent fork gains momentum, i can probably even stop spending tokens on mine.
desireco42 18 hours ago [-]
I used Zellij in the past, it is also fantastic and intuitive product. I had issues with... I think selection and copying and pasting which made me abandon it as I was getting frustrated. Herdr has been wonderful and I've been using it for a while.
saghm 17 hours ago [-]
Pretty much the first thing I tried to set up with I heard about Zellij and decided to give it a shot a while back was how to scroll back and copy paste text without using the mouse, since that's one of the core features of tmux for me. If my recollection is correct, the closest thing that I was able to figure out was some sort of built-in way to open output in a vim buffer, with the info I found when googling basically saying that it was intentionally not something the developers felt like it was important to implement anything closer to tmux for. Maybe it's changed since then but I distinctly got the impression that it using it would force me to adapt to a bunch of new workflows that didn't resemble anything I had seen before, and it didn't really seem worth the effort.
bpshaver 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know, this seems reasonable. I already know how to select, copy, and manipulate text in my $EDITOR. Why would a terminal multiplexer try to implement all of that rather than just let me open the terminal in my $EDITOR?
saghm 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not opposed to using the same shortcuts as editors (which is what tmux already does; you can even pick between emacs and vim shortcuts, in addition to configuring your own); there's just a lot of other stuff I _don't_ want from a text editor for my existing terminal output, like, editing text.
ajoseps 13 hours ago [-]
I recently switched to Zellij with Ghostty and the selection/copy/pasting seems to work just fine. I previously used zellij and kitty and I would have issues.
desireco42 5 hours ago [-]
Since I am using Ghostty I can give it a try, it would be nice to see it resolved as it was stupid tbh, all the difficult stuff is working well.
stingraycharles 12 hours ago [-]
But I’m already using ghostty. I installed herdr but made the mistake of launching it from within tmux and had no idea how to close it.
I then opened it somewhere else, but I had no idea how to interact with it. I also couldn’t get two other windows to “join” the same herdr session, so I gave up and went back to tmux.
For someone who has used screen / tmux for almost 30 years at this point, what does herdr do that tmux can’t?
I use Claude Code extensively. I also use plannotator extensively, which is how I found out about it.
WinstonSmith84 11 hours ago [-]
It's all about agentic work. Tmux doesn't know what an Agent is. You use Pi, you use CC, you use Codex, ... they all have primary supports in Herdr with built-in integrations around each of these harnesses
But if you don't do any agentic work, Herdr has 0 value vs. tmux.
stingraycharles 10 hours ago [-]
I use Claude Code extensively as I mentioned, but what does “primary support” look like? Why should tmux “know” what an agent is?
I just use tmux with multiple ghostty sessions and I have different Claude code sessions behind different tabs and panes and work like that.
What am I missing out on that justifies now using a normal terminal+tmux anymore?
j3g6t 7 hours ago [-]
lol at the other replies waffling at you without describing the things that makes herdr appealing:
* agentic inbox [see which agents are waiting for your input/working/idle etc]
* agents can read, spawn, send-input etc other herdr panes
* makes cross harness orchestration / communication easier
fwiw I liked herdr initially but bounced after like a week because ghostty + notifications + harness extensions gave me enough that it wasnt worth learning the new thing.
threecheese 9 hours ago [-]
If tmux can know what an agent is, it can be leveraged to communicate with an instance of that agent (input and output) given it owns the PTY, and that terminal output can be structured somehow.
If it can communicate with the agent, it can be used to drive the agent - to send it tasks, and communicate the status of those tasks.
And so Herdr - and Superlogical, and others, is a tool which leverages PTY ownership and terminal protocols to allow orchestration of coding agents across vendors using their CLI surfaces.
vardalab 3 hours ago [-]
But Claude Code and Codex and the rest of tui harnesses are also very good at just typing in each other's panes basically when I need to send a message over. It's been working for almost a year now. I have been more intrigued by T3 code or something similar, just to be able for harnesses to message across machines.
strobe 10 hours ago [-]
overall not so much, but basically if inside tmux you have 100 terminals opened and only 10 of those has 'agents' it will allow you switch quickly between those 10 terminals without spending too much time on locating those. also it will show statuses about agents, is it work done already and you may need to check it and stuff like this.
the_real_cher 9 hours ago [-]
If you do Claude remote control plus Claude app/site you get all of that though...scratches head.
asa123 8 hours ago [-]
part of the point is so you don’t need to stick with claude/anthropic apps? you can use other models i’m assuming
the_real_cher 1 hours ago [-]
I would assume other models have their own harnesses as well but I guess if you want it at all in one place that would make sense. I just need a single model.
gf000 3 hours ago [-]
How to properly secure it?
If you put it in a sandbox than herdr can no longer see it, can it?
From someone who also used screen and tmux for 30 years: 3 reasons why I switched to herder. They may not be relevant to you and in that case tmux is just great. One: visual indication which agent is working and which is waiting for an input. Two: native support for remote herdr sessions - in the same view. Three: it’s responsive and can be completely touch-driven through menus on a small iOS screen in Termius.
persedes 9 hours ago [-]
I was looking into Herdr too, but could not bring myself to switch away from tmux yet (there are a couple of shortcuts that I have in my workflow, which I can't config in Herdr).
What I ended up doing was to use the tmux agent sidebar, which, with mouse support, I think does a lot of the same things already.
shdjhdfh 8 hours ago [-]
All of this, plus it knows what agent is running in which windows and what session that agent is working on. If you have to reboot, it can reconstruct all your terminal setup and restart the agents on the right session automatically.
rubslopes 10 hours ago [-]
For me, the main reason is the remote sessions. I can copy and paste text and files in a remote session with no extra config, it's amazing!
ricardobeat 11 hours ago [-]
The point about libghostty is that Herdr doesn't try to reimplement shell forwarding or emulation, instead it uses the same code your terminal already does. This avoids compatibility problems with more complex TUIs.
Running `herdr` always opens the same session, the app is a just a UI for a server running in the background. But there is no reason to open it in multiple windows, the point is to manage all shells from inside it.
Then you can from another machine do `herdr --remote xxx.local` (over Tailscale) to access the same session, or use `herdr machine add` to get your shells from all machines at once - I don't really use this part.
IceDane 8 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, but aren't you just saying "I opened a thing that I didn't read any documentation for and don't know how to use it"? Did you know how to use tmux without reading the docs?
Tadpole9181 6 hours ago [-]
What's more, the sidebar literally has a thing that says "Menu". When you click it, one of the options is "detach". It's not rocket science...
nylonstrung 12 hours ago [-]
Herdr is great, one of the exceptionally few TUI applications I actually use daily
On the note of libghostty it does get me very excited about the new multiplexer thing Hashimoto is building with it
chrisvalleybay 12 hours ago [-]
Rex (by Hashimoto/Superlogical) is good. It’s really, really good. Feels and looks great.
> Herdr is wonderful, not only because of the coding agent integrations, but also because it uses libghostty under the hood. So no terminal-emulator-inside-another-terminal-emulator shenanigans.
Now I’m interested. Does it have basic feature parity? How does it compare to tmux in your experience?
roflchoppa 14 hours ago [-]
I was able to have a language model configure herdr with the same bindings that I was using in tmux.
It was a very easy transition from one to the other.
aforwardslash 16 hours ago [-]
I started using it last week, the tui interface is very polished and it is mouse-friendly. It also allows you to configure the notification channels. Its a different beast from tmox, I'd say its quite more user-friendly and gives you a list of your running agents and their status directly on the interface.
yako21000 17 hours ago [-]
I could not work without it anymore, such an easy solution for a common problem. Will definitely try out the app as well.
shepherdjerred 16 hours ago [-]
Really happy to see this!
herdr is by far the most polished tool in its category. Software geared towards agents is usually vibe coded -- and you can tell. There will be bugs and edge cases and it feels like no thought/care was put into it.
herdr doesn't feel that way to me. The marketing/landing page definitely has LLM-isms, but the application itself is very stable and well thought out.
A true UI is the next logical step and they seem to have done the obvious things. The one surprising bit that nobody seems to be talking about (yet) is the entire UI looks like its controlled via "recipes", so you can customize the UI in ways that you couldn't with traditional software: https://herdr.dev/layouts/
I hope this means an official mobile app is on the horizon!
shepherdjerred 16 hours ago [-]
Playing with this for a bit, the customization you can do is really cool. You can spin up an agent, tell it to add some functionality, and it all reloads instantly.
For example, I wanted to be able to hide chats from providers when my usage is out for the 5h/weekly period
I'm not sure how they're doing this considering it seems to be written in Rust
pveierland 13 hours ago [-]
It is using JavaScript for user interface customization via:
> herdr is by far the most polished tool in its category.
Can't speak to this, but I like that I didn't feel like I needed to try an alternative. It just did exactly what I needed it to do.
That said - I couldn't find a way to move a pane to a new tab. I can swap panes within a single pane (select -> right click -> swap with focused pane), but I can't find a way to do it between tabs. Maybe it's a skill issue. Anyone have any ideas?
pavelrub 10 hours ago [-]
Although this isn't a direct answer to your question, but everything that can be done in Herdr is trivially discoverable by asking a CC (or equivalent) session inside Herdr. In fact a lot of the things I do in Herdr I do by asking an agent to do it for me, instead of trying to learn how to do it manually.
Some things might require a non-trivial workaround, but a coding agent will also happily build and test it for you.
9cb14c1ec0 8 hours ago [-]
Have you tried T3 Code? IMO it goes a step further on UI by dropping the idea of interacting via a terminal. Also it has had an official mobile app for months.
madeofpalk 8 hours ago [-]
T3 Code, Paseo, Conductor, Orca, Jetbrains Air, Jetbrains Thinkrail, etc.
There's 30 million of these and they all look basically identical.
shepherdjerred 5 hours ago [-]
I haven’t tried T3 but I have tried Paseo and Conductor.
IMO it’s a great idea in theory but there are too many rough edges.
monk_grilla 14 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I was really sceptical of it and was in the camp of "tmux does all I need" but it is honestly fantastic and ever since they added the ability to access multiple ssh machines from one herdr session I just live inside it.
ebr4him 15 hours ago [-]
You probably haven’t tried Superlogical Rex then.
ashkankiani 12 hours ago [-]
That's funny, I got tired of tmux the other day (it got into 100% spin loop from an unsigned int underflow used as a loop condition variable. and I debugged it all by myself like a big boy, without LLMs!) and built something that seems to be identical in architecture in terms of the "supervisor which allocates pty, just stream bytes, client decodes" part. I even use libghostty for the HW accelerated GUI I built. It's the right way to go imo and it's not too difficult to build... hence...
I don't really understand why they would turn this into a company. I become suspicious of products that raise a lot of VC money, implying that they expect a unicorn-ish valuation, where I don't see them being able to justify their valuation via obvious monetization techniques (e.g. selling a classic license for a GUI app where you get updates for some period of time, usually a year, and then you get to keep the software, but no longer get updates, just in case people forgot how things worked before subscriptions).
That usually implies something like selling cloud subscriptions, vendor lock-in, or selling data. I'm happy to be wrong, but it's just an extremely common pattern. And as an aside, I know there's an impulse to monetize everything, but I think we should probably fight that impulse.
imagetic 13 hours ago [-]
Got my invite today. My jaw dropped.
z3ugma 5 hours ago [-]
People should put a screenshot of their desktop app in the README of their GitHub repos
I've been using Orca for this as it's the most popular on GitHub and seems to have more features. Is there anything notable that this offers over it?
sligbad 8 hours ago [-]
Orca was too heavy and, ultimately, too slow for me too keep using. Switched to herdr haven't looked back.
Sandman 11 hours ago [-]
Herdr looks awesome, exactly what I need. However, automatic updates worry me in the light of recent supply chain attacks. I don't want be in a situation where one day I just find out I'm running malware on my computer. I'm not sure if there's an option to turn it off.
indemnity 16 hours ago [-]
In this vein I’ve started using Tern (https://stencil.so/tern), but it’s closed beta, from the creator of Oh My Pi.
This space seems to be heating up, everyone wanting to build the single pane of glass for agentic work.
alansaber 12 hours ago [-]
There's still space for innovation and UIUX improvements so why not I say
evulhotdog 15 hours ago [-]
I got access this week and I am blown away at how much better it makes oh-my-pi, and omp was already great!
technocratius 14 hours ago [-]
I got access around a week ago but found it quite unintuitive and found myself sticking to herdr for now, but was probably a bit quick to judge. What makes tern great for you?
barrenko 15 hours ago [-]
I've got access weeks ago, seems I've completely misunderstood what it does!
newdee 12 hours ago [-]
Wow, that site is gorgeous
athrowaway3z 15 hours ago [-]
Having used herdr since its release, the recent 'Emacs is 50' made me decide to go back to it and just vibecode herdr features i use into an emacs package.
It works great so far. I can just ask it to update its layout whenever i think something better is possible. I wont be going back, but the one thing that might change that is a mobile app.
v9v 11 hours ago [-]
I'd love to give it a spin if you ever publish it.
frantathefranta 7 hours ago [-]
Another vote for publishing it, would love something like this in Emacs.
DaSHacka 18 hours ago [-]
Darn, title had me thinking they released a mobile app to compliment the TUI daemon.
termux+mosh is fine, but especially on a phone I'd love a slightly more intuitive (or really, efficient) UI. Especially as mosh breaks touch/mouse input on the remote host.
I've never understood the point of the desktop GUI harnesses to run TUI (or at the very least, primarily text-based) programs anyway, but perhaps they're better for onboarding less tech-savvy users.
walthamstow 13 hours ago [-]
I've been using a Collie on Android to connect to my herdr server, it's very good
If you are on iOS, Heeler is a great Herdr client.
sooheon 18 hours ago [-]
Have you tried moshi? It’s Herdr aware.
Tui-in-guis like orca are nice mostly because of sensible keybinds without prefix or leader
Guillaume86 5 hours ago [-]
Looks good but not way I'm paying a subscription for a tool like this, make me pay a one time fee and give 1 year of updates (90€ would still be too much for me, 50€ I might reconsider).
Gooblebrai 2 hours ago [-]
You can already do that. They have a one-off payment forever
jasford 17 hours ago [-]
Moshi is pretty fantastic. I’ve been using it for several months and it works great. The developer is also launching fixes and improvements every week. It’s gotten materially better over the time I’ve been using it and it started out pretty great.
adamisnotroman 18 hours ago [-]
try cosyra mobile. Its the best mobile client for herdr. It uses websocket and is has a really smooth ux.
wallst07 10 hours ago [-]
This is a paid per month app? Why?
gkfasdfasdf 4 hours ago [-]
This new GUI looks awesome, however it's not clear how to do the agent integration? With the TUI I installed the skill via `npx skills add https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr --skill herdr` and the agent knew what I was talking about when I said herdr, now I have to tell the agent 'Read `herdr-app --skill` and ...' - seems like extra steps?
physicles 6 hours ago [-]
I left tmux+vscode a few months ago and haven’t looked back. Clearly this new thing is better than flipping between a dozen tmux panes and other windows.
But I’m using my own “IDE” inspired by herdr and pane, worktrees down the left and panes on the right, but besides terminals the types of panes also include:
- A native Obsidian-level markdown editor with support for comments that agents can see
- Claude code with chrome for context size, and a custom UI that looks more like the web
- A diff viewer with support for comments
- A browser
- Can tag worktrees with PRs and issues
- Everything (except the browser) works seamlessly over ssh
It’s all zig+gtk, all vibe coded. I rarely open vscode these days.
Maybe the herdr plugin ecosystem can support all this too. I kinda want to get out of the business of hand-polishing UI.
joelhaasnoot 6 hours ago [-]
I actually did the same but at some point was like "this is good enough" and it works well. Diffs, comments on diffs, integration with Linear and worktrees is good enough for now and gives me a productivity boost. Couple of other apps in the space but at the time none supported Claude Code in terminals
nullishdomain 15 hours ago [-]
The Herdr website [1] has one of the best demos I have seen, one that I think would blow away those who aren’t nearly as AI-brained as I am. Why are we locked into old, boring UIs when I can just ask the agent for something like cows in a pasture or Windows 98?
We're not, plenty of applications support custom themes.
nullishdomain 15 hours ago [-]
I have never used an application where I can type in anything close to "make this look like Windows 98" and it just works.
loveparade 13 hours ago [-]
For all applications that support theming you can ask an agent "make this look like windows 98"
don't quite understand how typing it into a popup instead of an agent makes it revolutionary
nullishdomain 13 hours ago [-]
News to me, I guess. I have never seen anything like these demos. Most themes in software I use change colors or rearrange existing UI elements rather than create kanban boards and floating interactive cows where they did not exist before.
dullcrisp 8 hours ago [-]
Don’t get me wrong, I think having much more customizability now that maintaining complex configurations is easier is absolutely the direction we should be headed in. I don’t think floating cows are going to be the ultimate goal, but it is a step in that direction.
But this sort of theming specifically is something that was experimented with a couple decades ago and given up because people wanted simplicity and consistency instead. It’ll be exciting if LLMs reverse the trend.
dullcrisp 15 hours ago [-]
I mean one where you can say to herdr, make that look like Windows 98. Still can’t think of a good example that’s not already from Windows 98 unfortunately.
game_the0ry 18 hours ago [-]
This is the first time I have even hear of Herdr, and I try to make an effort to follow ai.
It's getting very difficult to keep up with all the agent harnesses coming out. I love ai but wow its hard to keep up.
shepherdjerred 16 hours ago [-]
herdr is moderately well known if you look into agent multiplexers. IMO it is the best one from what I have tried (Paseo and Conductor are competitors in this area)
It's not a harness -- it's really more like a tmux for agents.
pcthrowaway 5 hours ago [-]
I haven't used it yet, but isn't it also a Harness? Or do you run Pi or Claude CLI or whatever from inside Herdr?
shepherdjerred 5 hours ago [-]
No it’s not a harness at all!
A harness is what does the model loop, tool calls, etc
herdr does none of this. It’s really just a tmux/terminal geared towards organizing harnesses like Claude Code or Codex CLI
It’s a really great approach because you can use whatever cli you want, or even a mix.
ramraj07 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
siva7 16 hours ago [-]
Your comment is so comically dumb.. Herdr is yet another recently vibe coded ai helper in a niche category. You wouldn't miss anything about frontier ai or coding agents if you don't use herdr and/or terminal multiplexers in your workflow.
drTobiasFunke 17 hours ago [-]
I have been using herdr for a few months. Then i bought a new machine, installed claude code and asked it to setup herdr. Shockingly claude said it has no idea what herdr was. This was weird.
So I wouldn’t blame the commenter above.
swoorup 6 hours ago [-]
I understand this got funded by YC. But how is it supposed to make money?
enpe 6 hours ago [-]
herdr cloud
> The goal is to link your machines with a single command and stop worrying about how to reach them. Herdr Cloud would provide the middleman layer for those connections.
The examples of this new desktop app already use a hc command which could hint at that service (my guess)
tiffanyh 18 hours ago [-]
What’s the planned monetization model for all the terminal multiplexers backed by VC funding like Herdr, Rex, etc?
oefrha 18 hours ago [-]
Being acquired for $10B by $1T companies.
barrenko 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, become too big not to be acquired.
skinfaxi 18 hours ago [-]
If the terminal is just a screen to a remote, they will sell you the remote, completely integrated into the harness.
adamisnotroman 18 hours ago [-]
I think they are all planning to make money on selling cloud or inference
stwrt 5 hours ago [-]
I have had much better experiences with the desktop apps for managing LLMs compared to the terminal.
Tasks like switching between multiple sessions, copying and pasting, viewing diagrams/web pages, and resuming remote sessions I have found significantly more polished when using the desktop app equivalents.
ziofill 18 hours ago [-]
> Usage telemetry is on by default in releases. Turn it off in Settings → Privacy.
Probably a good idea if you work with sensitive data (and you’re already on Zero Data Retention)
devjam 13 hours ago [-]
Telemetry does not include any data from your terminals, or names of files, folders or projects. In fact they even provide an example JSON payload for you to inspect in the settings dialog.
kyle-avrett 4 hours ago [-]
Just finished ricing herdr-app with pi, damn it looks good!
Looks good but doesn't have a browser yes, like all the desktop applications of major harnesses have. Having a browser accessible to both the user and the model is extremely useful. I know you can do it via MCP but still, having a baked in one is better.
FacelessJim 9 hours ago [-]
I can’t seem to understand if this is something that could also be used without agents. I see the appeal of having first support for agents but I’d also like something I can use myself like I use tmux, without agents.
If agents didn’t exist, would herdr provide a nice UX as a terminal multiplexer?
perarneng 7 hours ago [-]
I just got started with https://www.onorca.dev and I like it, how is herdr.app different if anyone knows?
testycool 7 hours ago [-]
Uses less resources since it's mostly Rust, to my knowledge. Whereas Orca uses Electron.
swingboy 11 hours ago [-]
Does herdr have a mobile app like Orca?
sputknick 10 hours ago [-]
I think you are supposed to use Collie as your mobile app for herdr, but I'm still trying to figure this out, so I could be wrong
sonar_un 5 hours ago [-]
The app doesn't even work as advertised. Opened the app, started a new session, closed the app, and my session was gone. I thought this was supposed to be persistent sessions. I think i'll keep using Cmux.
kkukshtel 3 hours ago [-]
Can someone tell me if I should invest in any of these or just wait until mitchel's multiplexer is out?
oefrha 18 hours ago [-]
Supports SSH to remote machines out of the box, cool. I wonder if the protocol is more efficient than the TUI over SSH, would be nice on crappy connections when traveling.
adamisnotroman 18 hours ago [-]
the poor experience on a crappy network connection is an SSH problem unfortunately
oefrha 18 hours ago [-]
It is, but if you send more efficient deltas, batch packets more intelligently, and introduce non-blocking UI tricks, the experience can be improved by quite a bit. mosh demonstrates some of that.
nsonha 11 hours ago [-]
this is a solved problem with mosh
adamisnotroman 41 minutes ago [-]
true, BUT mosh does have its tradeoffs. I actually prefer using tdp but using jwt for auth and websocket for transfer. Best of both worlds
aaronschroeder 6 hours ago [-]
It's hard to beat Claude Code with /remote. I can easily keep things moving from my laptop, phone, or another desktop. I realize Herdr can technically do that too and across more agents, but it's more to setup and I really don't need that.
unreal6 4 hours ago [-]
This is just so cool. I've been spending all morning having my agents mod and tweak herdr to fit my workflow exactly
jbellis 18 hours ago [-]
If you like Herdr, you might also appreciate https://github.com/BrokkAi/mjolnir/, which is similar in its multiplexing features (although built on ACP) but offers cross-provider subagents, memory and session log sync, live migration of sessions across profiles and providers, and load balancing across multiple subscriptions.
tjansen 11 hours ago [-]
Didn't have much time to try it this morning, but so far the Herdr app looks fantastic. I am already using herdr on the console to control Claude on my Mac Mini, but having to log in again after closing my Macbook was always annoying. And I missed seeing the code diffs and being able to commit changes in VSCode, which is still my preferred development environment today (with the Claude VSCode extension).
But Herdr app addresses both issues. I don't need to reconnect, and it has a diff tool that allows me to review and commit. Looking forward to work with it!
_bobm 15 hours ago [-]
The relevant question: is herdr going to be sunset by herdr-app backed by herdr-core?
To me this is a valid signal.
WinstonSmith84 12 hours ago [-]
I was wondering this, too. The desktop appears to be based on herdr-core, and naturally I'd have imagined Herdr Server (terminal) to migrate to herdr-core as well. In fact I'm not even sure why they built herdr-core when they had Herdr Server ..
I was initially excited because I thought I could just try out a new frontend while keeping my 10 existing spaces each with 10 worktrees each with 2 or more tabs untouched.
p_l 10 hours ago [-]
Same here - just started to really get going with herdr not sure I want to worry about moving again
fridder 5 hours ago [-]
I've done a little poking around and there is one glaring annoyance. Why didn't they keep the keymap from the tui?
lexoj 14 hours ago [-]
How does it compare to Rex? (I use Rex but haven’t tried herdr so cant compare yet)
tietjens 12 hours ago [-]
I've been waiting for Rex access! How are you using it, have you installed on different servers?
I have more faith in team behind Rex so not putting the time in for Herdr.
lexoj 1 hours ago [-]
Actually I haven’t used the tailscale stuff. I just ask my agent “to use rex” and it maintains my services and restarts them accordingly
ghempton 17 hours ago [-]
If you like the idea of herdr, but want something that isn't opinionated on terminal vs. desktop app and has mobile support, you might like https://github.com/codealong/codealong
mark_l_watson 18 hours ago [-]
Nice! I have been using herdr for a few months, love it and for me it is a step up from years using tmux. The new native Herdr app is yet another step up. I use multiple Macs with Tailscale connections and the Herdr app makes jumping around to different projects and different machines easier.
nlitened 11 hours ago [-]
As I understood, this is a completely different thing from what we had so far (herdr TUI), fully incompatible - so technically the only common thing between them is the team and the name.
It doesn't see the sessions in my already-running remote herdr server, you cannot access the Herdr App remote sessions from your mobile phone (previously you could via SSH client like Termius).
hujun236 8 hours ago [-]
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ezrabuenk 11 hours ago [-]
Does anyone have experience in how herdr compares to Zed?
I'm currently using Zed as my main "agent orchestrator" and IDE because it handles various simultaneous agents quite well, using different harnesses. I'm especially a fan of the diffs for code review and the ability to easily highlight code and add it to context. The way it handles worktrees and git is also nice, IMO.
overflowy 11 hours ago [-]
Can you use Zed with your regular Claude subscription?
peaxkl 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, if you have an active Claude subscription, you can connect to your existing installation using ACP (https://zed.dev/acp).
pupppet 19 hours ago [-]
How does it compare to CMUX?
mahmedtan 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sangupta 19 hours ago [-]
Haven't used Herdr before - was looking at README and was looking to check screenshots and documentation. However, Chrome reports the SSL cert to the site https://herdr.dev as invalid. Will wait till it gets resolved.
It works now. Haven't restarted browser/mac - so not sure what went wrong.
Anyways, Herdr looks powerful - will try it soon. One thing I find missing in every single one today, is that they do not allow using a different AI account based on the workspace/project you are on. It would come in handy in case of shared family machine.
grodriguez100 15 hours ago [-]
I don’t think they need to “allow” this specifically. Every new pane opens in a shell prompt. You must start the agent from there, so you can start each agent with different keys/accounts already.
abroadwin 4 hours ago [-]
Am I missing something, or is there no way to use plugins with the herdr app?
dada216 11 hours ago [-]
I just had a look at the site and screenshots, I usually run my coding agents containerized (one per project), anyone else doing this and wiring it to herdr? is it possible?
from a quick glance it seems to me it installs cc/codex/opencode/etc on it's own and just does multiplexing
salt-licker 10 hours ago [-]
I have a project that auto-containerizes with its own frontend, pretty sure you could wire the backend to herdr but haven’t done it yet: https://yaac.dev/
darccio 10 hours ago [-]
I'm working on https://corb.ax from the containerization side. I can check on integrating it with Herdr.
steve_adams_86 17 hours ago [-]
Is anyone else finding that it doesn't pick up Claude Code agents? My Agents pane stays empty no matter how many instances I start and work in. Appears to continue to work fine in herdr, though.
aheilbut 4 hours ago [-]
the fork from the original herdr tui (without any explanation of the plan or reasons) is quite confusing given that they are using different backends
herdr is great, and the original runs-in-a-terminal vision was cool, but at least on OSX it has a ton of selection management bugs that are pretty sucky.
cedws 13 hours ago [-]
I've been building something similar except it uses iroh for P2P instead of SSH. Would really like to use this but I don't want to use SSH.
edit: nevermind I see it presents a console rather than wrapping the agent with a native GUI. This won't work well on high latency connections.
scirob 13 hours ago [-]
I also built a similar thing a many. And in my experiments (even though iroh is great) iroh took significantly longer to reconnect vs mosh and ethernal. And actually plain old autossh was the best XP for me to close laptop get on traincopen again on mobile Internet.
So eventually I removed everything other than autossh.
Seeing as how many people are building similar things I'd love to share more. Maybe wanna ad each other respectively to the repo's ?I can share some of my benchmark results
cedws 13 hours ago [-]
For me connect time is not really a concern, it happens once when I open the app. In my project I'm wrapping agents using ACP and presenting an actual GUI, so latency doesn't really have a perceptible impact. Running Claude Code in a console over any kind of remote connection is gonna feel bad.
Rather than for network performance I'm using iroh because I don't want to need a direct network path to the machines running my agents. Yeah I have Tailscale but that's more work to set up and I don't want my app to depend on users have a TS network.
scirob 13 hours ago [-]
To elaborate on my usecase that herdr didn't so at all the the beginning but still does not do well: I have many vm's in different clouds working on different projects with different secrets that I want to keep isolated ( now also at home lan machines which when im travel get aliased to their tail scale address)
So my biggest requirements are around making isolation between environments convenient but safe from supply chain attacks .
I wonder what usecase you were optimizing for
nylonstrung 12 hours ago [-]
This sounds cool and a great use case for Iroh
ernsheong 11 hours ago [-]
Hmmm I tried it, but it didn't detect my open herdr sessions in the added machine. I don't see much benefit over herdr in Terminal/Ghostty, and I need to reconfigure my agents to make it work too.
slenk 7 hours ago [-]
But can I install herdr desktop app and connect to my SSH sessions? I'm not running herdr on desktops usually
slenk 7 hours ago [-]
I should have tried before asking
mintflow 14 hours ago [-]
Glad to see the desktop app and after did some research seems its like rex and with some once feature and it even have a Win98 easter egg if you can find it:)
Currently I am not switch to it because I just have my own app talk to the herdr daemon via my apps builtin tailscale and it works great
thewisenerd 17 hours ago [-]
while they do this, i hope they do not drop support for regular/other terminals
ignoring ALL the AI/agent features, herdr has been a decent replacement for tmux with saner defaults
so much so that i'm reaching for installing herdr instead of tmux
and i would like to not be locked to a "desktop app" for it
rao-v 17 hours ago [-]
+1 I tried quite hard to make things work with tmux, zellij, and even some light custom stuff, but if you have multiple agents running on multiple boxes herdr just works unreasonably well. I really didn't want to like what seemed like a random mix of features, but they've stabilized it to a sensible capability set.
withinrafael 12 hours ago [-]
Anyone using this or similar with self-hosted models/engines (not on local machine)? Didn't immediately see anything about that anywhere in the documentation.
xlii 12 hours ago [-]
The tabs mechanism didn't do it for me so I rolled my out (self-plug at [0]).
While it's not "agent-first" thanks to rich MCP I often use direct terminal control from one orchestrator agent to drive another one, and I haven't seen any generic solution like that.
Since I'm moving my work VM yesterday I even started working on ssh persistence using planted cross-compiled PTY host library. If anyone's interested check it out, I expect to roll it out within a week or so.
I prefer the TUI in ghostty and even that’s just a stopgap until superlogical is out of alpha.
kelvie 15 hours ago [-]
Fantastic news, I may have to switch back (or combine this with Paseo on my phone). I hope the RAM usage is a lot better as Paseo tends to OOM now and again (the desktop app).
Skunkleton 18 hours ago [-]
There is a Windows 98 mode w/ minesweeper, solitaire, and clippy!
Edit: oh neat! Its self editing.
febed 15 hours ago [-]
How does it compare to cmux and wave terminal?
jdorfman 15 hours ago [-]
It works great in Ghostty not sure if I need another standalone app. I’ll definitely try it out but my expectations are low.
sawyna 9 hours ago [-]
Is herdr in the similar park as superset?
adamisnotroman 18 hours ago [-]
Yep it’s awesome. I’m going to integrate the core engine to my mobile app so I can control it remotely.
Just termius + tmux works for me on my Android phone and iPad. I have a ntfy topic to alert from Pi when it needs something.
hujun236 8 hours ago [-]
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18 hours ago [-]
Hitech-Redneck 18 hours ago [-]
I've been holding this at arms length. Interested, but I'm so stuck on tmux.
mtrx 10 hours ago [-]
I use herdr daily. One thing I’ve always missed from all of these solutions, though, is the ability to actually make code changes..none of them seem to offer that properly. Am I the only one? Is the goal to abandon code entirely?
the_real_cher 9 hours ago [-]
From my limited understanding it's fancy tmux?
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Please lmk what the advantages are!
desireco42 18 hours ago [-]
I don't think I need it, but Herdr has been absolutely rock solid for me. And I have this app Pairfob that I can check things up on the phone if I really want to. And while I don't use it quite as often, seems to be more solid then Chatgpt (Codex) and other apps.
I have 2 machines and laptop linked together and running things have never been easier.
sammy2255 13 hours ago [-]
Another desktop application without a screenshot in the Readme.. sigh..
dgellow 12 hours ago [-]
Their website has lots of screenshots
pdantix 17 hours ago [-]
feels like they're trying to get ahead of superlogical's rex.
took all of installing it on windows and setting up my mac as an SSH machine to see the slop all through the UI. i'll just wait for rex's windows client i guess.
loveparade 17 hours ago [-]
I really enjoyed herdr at first but ever since they got VC funding I am avoiding it. Enshittification and cloud features due to vc/monetization pressure incoming.
rvz 17 hours ago [-]
Since you used herdr before it got funding, were you going to donate or pay for it without VC funding?
loveparade 14 hours ago [-]
I guess there is some nuance here. Would I pay for a very good agent multiplexer that makes me a lot more productive? Sure, same reason I pay for other apps or services.
But for Herdr specifically? Probably not. There are tons of similar free alternatives and even vibe coding your own is very easy with all the open source code of both herdr and all the alternatives available.
rvz 11 hours ago [-]
> Would I pay for a very good agent multiplexer that makes me a lot more productive?
That is not the question I am asking.
> But for Herdr specifically? Probably not.
So no then.
That is why they went for VC money since the author knew that donations weren't enough to maintain it in the open.
> There are tons of similar free alternatives and even vibe coding your own is very easy with all the open source code of both herdr and all the alternatives available.
Why would I waste tokens vibe coding something that would go unmaintained in 6 months (because it is "free") over a properly funded project that will last much longer than that?
The cost of maintenance is never "free".
loveparade 7 hours ago [-]
You dont have to vibecode and maintain it when there are 20 other projects that do the same or similar thing. And maintenance is not free, but you know waht's even more annoying? Getting locked into a product that is pressured to achieve VC returns and thus becomes enshittified. There is no moat here and it's painfully obvious that open source will win in this category in the long term.
grim_io 14 hours ago [-]
Are you asking the same question to emacs users?
rvz 11 hours ago [-]
Yes. So you donated to Emacs as a long time user?
grim_io 10 hours ago [-]
No, and i don't feel bad about it.
rvz 10 hours ago [-]
Good. So as you as a long time Emacs user, no donations to support them at all.
Thank you for proving my point.
grim_io 8 hours ago [-]
Don't confuse Open Source with an enshittification backdoor with Free Software.
rvz 6 hours ago [-]
Nope. I think you are confused since Herdr was free software and licensed under AGPL 3.0 [0] before it was VC funded.
One (emacs) gets millions in donations via the FSF and the other get little to no money or donations for being "free software" from the start despite both of them being "free software".
Which of these various new multiplexers (herdr, cmux, etc) work over ssh, and which have protocols underneath?
I've been scripting tmux for a while now, and it's not the greatest. And when I have a bunch of opencode sessions rolling along often my tmux could usage is smoking. I'd be happy to try other things. But I'd way rather get into something with protocols, that is open to play.
shepherdjerred 16 hours ago [-]
herdr has native support for remote machines. Both the CLI and the new app have this.
At work I do much of my work on a ec2 box via ssh with herdr
Zizizizz 14 hours ago [-]
Rex will as well apparently
lucas_the_human 17 hours ago [-]
I love herdr, nice work team!
lerp-io 12 hours ago [-]
u can do all this with react and tailwind tho lol.
DonHopkins 8 hours ago [-]
2004 called. They want to return their disemvoweled penultimate "e".
2004 - The Big Bang (Flickr) - Co-founder Caterina Fake wants to buy Flicker.com, but an offline beer brewer refuses to sell it. Out of options, she suggests dropping the "e". It works, and Flickr is born, instantly setting a precedent that typos equal modernism.
2005–2006 - The YC Copycat Flood - Paul Graham launches Y Combinator, and the application form might as well have had a checkbox for "did you delete a vowel to look disruptive?" Scribd (YC S06) drops the E because buying a real dictionary noun requires actual revenue. Twitpic and Pixlr emerge to capture that sweet, sweet pre-seed funding. Even Twitter originally launches in 2006 as "Twttr" because the actual domain is owned by a bird enthusiast. (They buy the "e" back six months later once they realize they look ridiculous).
2007 - The Peak of Style - Tumblr launches, proving the vowel-less trend isn't a passing fad but the official language of the new internet. Dropping the "e" becomes shorthand for "we have venture capital, a minimalist mobile interface, and absolutely no monetization strategy."
2009 - The Aggressive Pivot - Grindr launches. The convention branches out of pure utility and enters cultural lifestyle apps, cementing "-r" as the universal suffix for a location-based mobile service. Every YC batch now features at least three "Uber for X" startups named after a mangled verb.
2011–2012 - The Saturation Point - Companies like Blendr and Fiverr continue the trend, but the public begins to push back. Every SaaS tool on Hacker News looks like a typo. Critics and users start pointing out how incredibly annoying it is to vocally explain a business name ("It's called Taskr... no, without the E").
2015–2018 - The Death Kneel & Corrections - The joke gets old. Brand consultants begin labeling creative misspelling a "cardinal sin". Startups realize they are losing millions of organic visitors to the properly-spelled domains owned by domain squatters. The internet enters the "-ify" (Spotify, Shopify) and "-ly" (Bitly) eras, completely abandoning the broken suffix because pg wrote an essay saying missing vowels hurt your SEO.
2019–Present - The "Adult in the Room" Era - The trend is officially dead. Modern YC startups pivot toward ultra-literal names (The Browser Company) or aggressive, serious abstract words (OpenAI, CoreWeave) to pretend they are enterprise-ready AI infrastructure rather than a wrapper wrapper wrapper.
Postscript - The Ultimate Regression - The convention reaches its absolute, braindead rock bottom with Elon Musk. After burning 44 billion dollars to buy Twitter just so he could unban literal Nazis and amplify white supremacist conspiracy theories to the front page, he rebranded the entire platform to "X.com". It turns out "X" is just "Ex" without the penultimate "e" -- a fittingly hollow, single-letter monument to a sociopathic tech bro who couldn't innovate a functional name if his taxpayer subsidies depended on it.
Jeeetendra 3 hours ago [-]
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77ko 15 hours ago [-]
Herdr is truly awesome. Game changing almost. If you think of all the overly complex agent setups[1] and overly complex software factories[2] to write code... herdr and a pick-your-coding-agent replaces all that with a very simple one thing which just works.
There are many ways to do what herdr does, like tmux, and rex, but in a nutshell:
You launch cli things (claude code, cli tools etc) anywhere inside a herdr process. On your own laptop you magically stay connected to all of them and can monitor, send commands etc. And those processes can talk to each other and control each other too if u want!
For a single person with herdr+tailscale, you can make your own evolving software thingamajig across all the possible computers u have access to (pls don't call it a factory, we didn't call your fingers a factory in the dinosaur days did we).
p.s if someone from cloudflare reads this, would love to have a herdr process in a worker so it appears on my laptop as a thing i can do stuff with. while idle it goes dormant, i send a keystroke and it wakes up, stays awake for a bit.
p.p.s herdr team if u read this can you have a built in so i can instantly launch a vm in one of the many provide a instant vm (or sandbox or whatever the cool kids call it these days). I have been using the railway TS sdk to quickly spin up and throw away sandboxes, but why not just integrate <choose-your-sandbox-provider> in herdr and that is one way to charge money - pay herdr or provide my API key for vm/sandbox provider. Bonus points if it can sleep and charge less. Sort of like fly's sprites but more awesome.
procinct 15 hours ago [-]
Can you explain more about why you need to distribute agents between computers? Why not just run them on your local computer?
77ko 14 hours ago [-]
It depends on use cases.
I have multiple projects running in different locations/timezones - so I don't often need to have an agent running on a pc elsewhere - but just being able to smartly use herdr (also using rex) to set up a persistent service on those computers removes all the friction which used to exist with ssh keys and other things.
So I could do all these things before, tools like herdr make it easier, smoother.
Now tmux and ssh keys enabled all this before. So in a sense, nothing new here. but its a bit like dropbox - i used rsync back then, dropbox just made it easier to setup sharing and use without thinking.
solatic 15 hours ago [-]
My current anecdotal example: if you're building cross-platform native apps, you need to run agents on macOS and Windows, because xcodebuild only runs on macOS and the Windows SDK is only available on Windows.
Garlef 15 hours ago [-]
Because they use resources (tests, etc) and once you have a few running it impacts you.
First two sentences give zero information what it does. Third one is useful but i think many harnesses do it?
Continuing:
> A new kind of agent workspace. Native and terminal first, with nothing between you and your agents. Every part of it is a plain folder your agent can rewrite, and every agent keeps running when the window is gone.
Okay, more of the same. Let's press on.
> Your agents run agents. And hear back.
> An agent hands work to helpers and keeps going. When they finish, their reports land in its input. No copy-paste between windows: herdr-core carries the messages.
Are there modern harnesses that don't do subagents/subthreads/whatever the same way?
---
There are some interesting bits but the vibed copy is for me offputting and a sign even the author might not understand what he made.
herdr is very flexible, but it shines when you are working with multiple projects, with multiple worktrees, and multiple agents within those projects.
1. herdr uses workspaces to help organize tabs. Conceptually, a workspace probably maps to a project, but it doesn't have to.
2. herdr has native worktree support, and can create a nested workspace per worktree with a keyboard or CLI command. It can check out worktrees for you
3. herdr identifies agents across tabs and workspaces and pulls them out into an extra navigational pane. It shows the status of those agents (e.g. idle, working, waiting, done), and can play a sound when they change state. This helps you track multiple agents across multiple projects and quickly switch to them when they need help without needing to remember "claude is running in space 2, tab 3"
4. herdr integrates with your agents, which can control herdr's UI and rename tabs based on their status.
5. All this is scriptable via the herdr CLI, and agents are very good at it. But it also has full mouse support, if you're new to multiplexers its very easy to start interacting with it.
Agent status detection. Single view over local and remote agents. /herdr skill that lets agents list other agents, peek into their panes, send keys (yes, you can make a lot of it work with tmux and some elbow grease, but herdr provides nice cli/api for it and works out of the box) including to remote ones.
In my mental model, subagents are also different from top level agents in tabs: subagents are only great as temporary workers you never want to interact with.
This is an unlock, because these companies will (prob) never build this feature.
I used to hit usage walls with CC/Codex harness using native subagents
With herdr I delegate some work to another herdr pane and it runs Claude code, codex, opencode, pi, whatever model is appropriate and has usage
It's just a few bash scripts enabling agents to message each other. Works with the desktop apps as well so you could have a Codex or Claude desktop app orchestrate tmux sessions.
https://github.com/notaharness/plugins/blob/main/orchestra/R...
tmux is definitely usable but moving between workspaces/repos can be annoying if youre managing mahy many things at once. and difficult to organize. more over having agents manage other agents via tmux can lead to garbled input/output
i havent used codex. claude subagents i think arent the right comparison - the closer comparison would be claude managed agents. but i imagine one reason herdr might be better would be that you’re not stuck in the anthropic ecosystem
Is Codex, Claude Code mismanaging when no tokens left? Or any other specific reason?
What about together? Can you reasonably do agent to agent interactions across harnesses? herdr makes that easy.
One of my favorite reasons for using herdr is what I'll call "everything is a pane". Running a new agent? Runs in a herdr pane. sshing into a system? Runs in a herdr pane. Anything that runs in a herdr pane, your agents can interact with. I will often do things like ssh into a system in one pane, and then ask pi in another pane to help me do diagnostics on that system. It never has to try to ssh in directly in the harness with my credentials, it just sends keyboard input to the pane, and reads the content of the pane. I can watch the interactive session as it goes by.
Another workflow that I have sometimes is I'll kick off some work in an agent, and instead of making a new sub agent, I'll actually make a new parent agent if I get worried that it's going down an unnecessary rabbit hole. I'll tell the new agent something like "periodically watch the agent in pane X, it is working on Y but I am concerned that it is losing track of its tasking. Periodically review what it's doing, and make sure it doesn't go off the rails. If it does seem to be going off the rails, give it guidance to bring it back on track" and that seems to have helped.
[1] https://t3.codes/
At the end of the day it's a UX question. I could do the same as this (I use Paseo, similar thing, less obviously vibed copy in the docs if that helps...) with a bunch of terminal tabs and pi, and maybe some skills and scripts to help out, but it's a pain to manage.
They're unironically echoing the infamously iconic 1980 Calvin Klein jeans commercial starring a perversely sexualized underaged 15-year-old girl:
"You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." -Brooke Shields
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiQUMypDNoE
Except in this case, the romanticized "nothing" between you and your autonomous agents is a massive, multi-layered stack of legacy Unix abstractions, sockets, remote procedure calls, historic terminal emulators, escape codes, pseudo-tty device drivers, and modern infrastructure slop.
The reality of what is actually sitting between you and your agents:
- A herdr-core background daemon handling JSON-RPC IPC messages.
- A crates/ghostty-sys Rust FFI layer binding against libghostty-vt.
- A hardware-accelerated GPU rendering pipeline drawing terminal cell glyphs.
- A legacy Unix PTY subsystem providing master/slave pairs and terminal line discipline.
- An ancient mountain of VT100/ANSI escape codes and termios settings, with resize requests traveling through IPC and SIGWINCH signals notifying Unix terminal applications.
- A structured agent-status protocol carried by yet another terminal escape sequence, OSC 7501, then exposed through JSON-RPC.
"Nothing" says unfiltered, raw human intimacy quite like reading output from a pseudo-terminal file descriptor and watching \x1b[31m error logs cascade through an SSH pipeline and "pseudo" TTY device drivers.
Wrapping this tech in branding that sounds like a sultry, pseudo-erotic pitch is peak HBO Silicon Valley. TTY literally stands for teletype. We are supposedly building the frontier of autonomous artificial intelligence, yet our cutting-edge orchestration layer still routes interaction through abstractions inherited from noisy, electromechanical printing telegraphs of the 1960s. It's not a "native home for your displaced AI souls" -- it's an over-engineered wrapper shackled to the physical heritage of paper rolls and mechanical carriage-return timing: 110-baud Teletypes, separate carriage-return and line-feed operations, and terminal null padding conventions devised to give machinery time to move before the next character printed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33
If you prefer GUIs, I can recommend herdr-gpui which connects to a herdr daemon. It has a bunch of goodies like remote phone pairing, and a built-in browser integration to send screenshots and notes to coding agents.
https://github.com/penso/herdr-gpui
I then opened it somewhere else, but I had no idea how to interact with it. I also couldn’t get two other windows to “join” the same herdr session, so I gave up and went back to tmux.
For someone who has used screen / tmux for almost 30 years at this point, what does herdr do that tmux can’t?
I use Claude Code extensively. I also use plannotator extensively, which is how I found out about it.
But if you don't do any agentic work, Herdr has 0 value vs. tmux.
I just use tmux with multiple ghostty sessions and I have different Claude code sessions behind different tabs and panes and work like that.
What am I missing out on that justifies now using a normal terminal+tmux anymore?
* agentic inbox [see which agents are waiting for your input/working/idle etc] * agents can read, spawn, send-input etc other herdr panes * makes cross harness orchestration / communication easier
fwiw I liked herdr initially but bounced after like a week because ghostty + notifications + harness extensions gave me enough that it wasnt worth learning the new thing.
If it can communicate with the agent, it can be used to drive the agent - to send it tasks, and communicate the status of those tasks.
And so Herdr - and Superlogical, and others, is a tool which leverages PTY ownership and terminal protocols to allow orchestration of coding agents across vendors using their CLI surfaces.
If you put it in a sandbox than herdr can no longer see it, can it?
https://github.com/hiroppy/tmux-agent-sidebar
Has been pretty nice
Running `herdr` always opens the same session, the app is a just a UI for a server running in the background. But there is no reason to open it in multiple windows, the point is to manage all shells from inside it.
Then you can from another machine do `herdr --remote xxx.local` (over Tailscale) to access the same session, or use `herdr machine add` to get your shells from all machines at once - I don't really use this part.
On the note of libghostty it does get me very excited about the new multiplexer thing Hashimoto is building with it
Now I’m interested. Does it have basic feature parity? How does it compare to tmux in your experience?
herdr is by far the most polished tool in its category. Software geared towards agents is usually vibe coded -- and you can tell. There will be bugs and edge cases and it feels like no thought/care was put into it.
herdr doesn't feel that way to me. The marketing/landing page definitely has LLM-isms, but the application itself is very stable and well thought out.
A true UI is the next logical step and they seem to have done the obvious things. The one surprising bit that nobody seems to be talking about (yet) is the entire UI looks like its controlled via "recipes", so you can customize the UI in ways that you couldn't with traditional software: https://herdr.dev/layouts/
I hope this means an official mobile app is on the horizon!
For example, I wanted to be able to hide chats from providers when my usage is out for the 5h/weekly period
I'm not sure how they're doing this considering it seems to be written in Rust
https://gpui-kit.com/shell/
Can't speak to this, but I like that I didn't feel like I needed to try an alternative. It just did exactly what I needed it to do.
That said - I couldn't find a way to move a pane to a new tab. I can swap panes within a single pane (select -> right click -> swap with focused pane), but I can't find a way to do it between tabs. Maybe it's a skill issue. Anyone have any ideas?
Some things might require a non-trivial workaround, but a coding agent will also happily build and test it for you.
There's 30 million of these and they all look basically identical.
IMO it’s a great idea in theory but there are too many rough edges.
I don't really understand why they would turn this into a company. I become suspicious of products that raise a lot of VC money, implying that they expect a unicorn-ish valuation, where I don't see them being able to justify their valuation via obvious monetization techniques (e.g. selling a classic license for a GUI app where you get updates for some period of time, usually a year, and then you get to keep the software, but no longer get updates, just in case people forgot how things worked before subscriptions).
That usually implies something like selling cloud subscriptions, vendor lock-in, or selling data. I'm happy to be wrong, but it's just an extremely common pattern. And as an aside, I know there's an impulse to monetize everything, but I think we should probably fight that impulse.
This alone is worth trying the Desktop app
I'm sure I'll get bored once the novelty wears off
I'm already a happy user of herdr CLI (or whatever it is called. I use it from Ghostty)
Herdr Studio - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652188 - Sept 2026 (20 comments)
Connecting the machines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612818 - Sept 2026 (35 comments)
Herdr now connects to multiple servers with a single client - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602323 - Sept 2026 (3 comments)
Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201003 - Aug 2026 (189 comments)
Herdr: One terminal to rule them all - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756578 - July 2026 (178 comments)
Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714802 - June 2026 (110 comments)
This space seems to be heating up, everyone wanting to build the single pane of glass for agentic work.
It works great so far. I can just ask it to update its layout whenever i think something better is possible. I wont be going back, but the one thing that might change that is a mobile app.
termux+mosh is fine, but especially on a phone I'd love a slightly more intuitive (or really, efficient) UI. Especially as mosh breaks touch/mouse input on the remote host.
I've never understood the point of the desktop GUI harnesses to run TUI (or at the very least, primarily text-based) programs anyway, but perhaps they're better for onboarding less tech-savvy users.
I use it only with tailscale.
Tui-in-guis like orca are nice mostly because of sensible keybinds without prefix or leader
But I’m using my own “IDE” inspired by herdr and pane, worktrees down the left and panes on the right, but besides terminals the types of panes also include:
- A native Obsidian-level markdown editor with support for comments that agents can see - Claude code with chrome for context size, and a custom UI that looks more like the web - A diff viewer with support for comments - A browser - Can tag worktrees with PRs and issues - Everything (except the browser) works seamlessly over ssh
It’s all zig+gtk, all vibe coded. I rarely open vscode these days.
Maybe the herdr plugin ecosystem can support all this too. I kinda want to get out of the business of hand-polishing UI.
[1] https://herdr.dev
don't quite understand how typing it into a popup instead of an agent makes it revolutionary
But this sort of theming specifically is something that was experimented with a couple decades ago and given up because people wanted simplicity and consistency instead. It’ll be exciting if LLMs reverse the trend.
It's getting very difficult to keep up with all the agent harnesses coming out. I love ai but wow its hard to keep up.
It's not a harness -- it's really more like a tmux for agents.
A harness is what does the model loop, tool calls, etc
herdr does none of this. It’s really just a tmux/terminal geared towards organizing harnesses like Claude Code or Codex CLI
It’s a really great approach because you can use whatever cli you want, or even a mix.
So I wouldn’t blame the commenter above.
> The goal is to link your machines with a single command and stop worrying about how to reach them. Herdr Cloud would provide the middleman layer for those connections.
https://herdr.dev/blog/connecting-the-machines/
The examples of this new desktop app already use a hc command which could hint at that service (my guess)
Tasks like switching between multiple sessions, copying and pasting, viewing diagrams/web pages, and resuming remote sessions I have found significantly more polished when using the desktop app equivalents.
Probably a good idea if you work with sensitive data (and you’re already on Zero Data Retention)
https://github.com/kyle-avrett/herdr-square-dracula
If agents didn’t exist, would herdr provide a nice UX as a terminal multiplexer?
But Herdr app addresses both issues. I don't need to reconnect, and it has a diff tool that allows me to review and commit. Looking forward to work with it!
To me this is a valid signal.
Anyway, the best comment I could find is that one here where even the main dev doesn't know the direction .. https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr-app/issues/63#issuecomment...
Lack of vision and fragmentation is concerning
I have more faith in team behind Rex so not putting the time in for Herdr.
It doesn't see the sessions in my already-running remote herdr server, you cannot access the Herdr App remote sessions from your mobile phone (previously you could via SSH client like Termius).
I'm currently using Zed as my main "agent orchestrator" and IDE because it handles various simultaneous agents quite well, using different harnesses. I'm especially a fan of the diffs for code review and the ability to easily highlight code and add it to context. The way it handles worktrees and git is also nice, IMO.
Anyways, Herdr looks powerful - will try it soon. One thing I find missing in every single one today, is that they do not allow using a different AI account based on the workspace/project you are on. It would come in handy in case of shared family machine.
herdr is great, and the original runs-in-a-terminal vision was cool, but at least on OSX it has a ton of selection management bugs that are pretty sucky.
edit: nevermind I see it presents a console rather than wrapping the agent with a native GUI. This won't work well on high latency connections.
So eventually I removed everything other than autossh.
Seeing as how many people are building similar things I'd love to share more. Maybe wanna ad each other respectively to the repo's ?I can share some of my benchmark results
Rather than for network performance I'm using iroh because I don't want to need a direct network path to the machines running my agents. Yeah I have Tailscale but that's more work to set up and I don't want my app to depend on users have a TS network.
So my biggest requirements are around making isolation between environments convenient but safe from supply chain attacks .
I wonder what usecase you were optimizing for
Currently I am not switch to it because I just have my own app talk to the herdr daemon via my apps builtin tailscale and it works great
ignoring ALL the AI/agent features, herdr has been a decent replacement for tmux with saner defaults
so much so that i'm reaching for installing herdr instead of tmux and i would like to not be locked to a "desktop app" for it
While it's not "agent-first" thanks to rich MCP I often use direct terminal control from one orchestrator agent to drive another one, and I haven't seen any generic solution like that.
Since I'm moving my work VM yesterday I even started working on ssh persistence using planted cross-compiled PTY host library. If anyone's interested check it out, I expect to roll it out within a week or so.
[0]: https://race-term.com
Edit: oh neat! Its self editing.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Please lmk what the advantages are!
I have 2 machines and laptop linked together and running things have never been easier.
took all of installing it on windows and setting up my mac as an SSH machine to see the slop all through the UI. i'll just wait for rex's windows client i guess.
But for Herdr specifically? Probably not. There are tons of similar free alternatives and even vibe coding your own is very easy with all the open source code of both herdr and all the alternatives available.
That is not the question I am asking.
> But for Herdr specifically? Probably not.
So no then.
That is why they went for VC money since the author knew that donations weren't enough to maintain it in the open.
> There are tons of similar free alternatives and even vibe coding your own is very easy with all the open source code of both herdr and all the alternatives available.
Why would I waste tokens vibe coding something that would go unmaintained in 6 months (because it is "free") over a properly funded project that will last much longer than that?
The cost of maintenance is never "free".
Thank you for proving my point.
One (emacs) gets millions in donations via the FSF and the other get little to no money or donations for being "free software" from the start despite both of them being "free software".
[0] https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr/blob/a57b97285c3308fbdcc16...
I've been scripting tmux for a while now, and it's not the greatest. And when I have a bunch of opencode sessions rolling along often my tmux could usage is smoking. I'd be happy to try other things. But I'd way rather get into something with protocols, that is open to play.
At work I do much of my work on a ec2 box via ssh with herdr
2004 - The Big Bang (Flickr) - Co-founder Caterina Fake wants to buy Flicker.com, but an offline beer brewer refuses to sell it. Out of options, she suggests dropping the "e". It works, and Flickr is born, instantly setting a precedent that typos equal modernism.
2005–2006 - The YC Copycat Flood - Paul Graham launches Y Combinator, and the application form might as well have had a checkbox for "did you delete a vowel to look disruptive?" Scribd (YC S06) drops the E because buying a real dictionary noun requires actual revenue. Twitpic and Pixlr emerge to capture that sweet, sweet pre-seed funding. Even Twitter originally launches in 2006 as "Twttr" because the actual domain is owned by a bird enthusiast. (They buy the "e" back six months later once they realize they look ridiculous).
2007 - The Peak of Style - Tumblr launches, proving the vowel-less trend isn't a passing fad but the official language of the new internet. Dropping the "e" becomes shorthand for "we have venture capital, a minimalist mobile interface, and absolutely no monetization strategy."
2009 - The Aggressive Pivot - Grindr launches. The convention branches out of pure utility and enters cultural lifestyle apps, cementing "-r" as the universal suffix for a location-based mobile service. Every YC batch now features at least three "Uber for X" startups named after a mangled verb.
2011–2012 - The Saturation Point - Companies like Blendr and Fiverr continue the trend, but the public begins to push back. Every SaaS tool on Hacker News looks like a typo. Critics and users start pointing out how incredibly annoying it is to vocally explain a business name ("It's called Taskr... no, without the E").
2015–2018 - The Death Kneel & Corrections - The joke gets old. Brand consultants begin labeling creative misspelling a "cardinal sin". Startups realize they are losing millions of organic visitors to the properly-spelled domains owned by domain squatters. The internet enters the "-ify" (Spotify, Shopify) and "-ly" (Bitly) eras, completely abandoning the broken suffix because pg wrote an essay saying missing vowels hurt your SEO.
2019–Present - The "Adult in the Room" Era - The trend is officially dead. Modern YC startups pivot toward ultra-literal names (The Browser Company) or aggressive, serious abstract words (OpenAI, CoreWeave) to pretend they are enterprise-ready AI infrastructure rather than a wrapper wrapper wrapper.
Postscript - The Ultimate Regression - The convention reaches its absolute, braindead rock bottom with Elon Musk. After burning 44 billion dollars to buy Twitter just so he could unban literal Nazis and amplify white supremacist conspiracy theories to the front page, he rebranded the entire platform to "X.com". It turns out "X" is just "Ex" without the penultimate "e" -- a fittingly hollow, single-letter monument to a sociopathic tech bro who couldn't innovate a functional name if his taxpayer subsidies depended on it.
There are many ways to do what herdr does, like tmux, and rex, but in a nutshell:
You launch cli things (claude code, cli tools etc) anywhere inside a herdr process. On your own laptop you magically stay connected to all of them and can monitor, send commands etc. And those processes can talk to each other and control each other too if u want!
For a single person with herdr+tailscale, you can make your own evolving software thingamajig across all the possible computers u have access to (pls don't call it a factory, we didn't call your fingers a factory in the dinosaur days did we).
[1]: https://www.8090.ai/ [2]: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
p.s if someone from cloudflare reads this, would love to have a herdr process in a worker so it appears on my laptop as a thing i can do stuff with. while idle it goes dormant, i send a keystroke and it wakes up, stays awake for a bit.
p.p.s herdr team if u read this can you have a built in so i can instantly launch a vm in one of the many provide a instant vm (or sandbox or whatever the cool kids call it these days). I have been using the railway TS sdk to quickly spin up and throw away sandboxes, but why not just integrate <choose-your-sandbox-provider> in herdr and that is one way to charge money - pay herdr or provide my API key for vm/sandbox provider. Bonus points if it can sleep and charge less. Sort of like fly's sprites but more awesome.
I have multiple projects running in different locations/timezones - so I don't often need to have an agent running on a pc elsewhere - but just being able to smartly use herdr (also using rex) to set up a persistent service on those computers removes all the friction which used to exist with ssh keys and other things.
So I could do all these things before, tools like herdr make it easier, smoother.
Now tmux and ssh keys enabled all this before. So in a sense, nothing new here. but its a bit like dropbox - i used rsync back then, dropbox just made it easier to setup sharing and use without thinking.