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  • I decided to test herdr and orca today and I'm really impressed with both, especially orca.

    I had no idea how far the ADE / multiplexer space was, I'm very excited for more progress in this space!

    by hmokiguess
  • There's also https://github.com/code-yeongyu/oh-my-openagent which is very active
    by pandinus
  • Nice! Might want to just plug my personal project too - which is more of a gui for managing agents across restarts, and tracking their context: https://github.com/itsdchen/gogoagent
    by daveed
  • I use coding agent but still don’t see the need to manage a swarm of them like this. Is there an actual use case for this or this is just for tokenmaxxing?
    by mrbonner
  • It's useful for running multiple long running tasks alongside your "primary" work. As an example I currently have 3 tabs open running a PR review, 1 tab running "autonomous development" for a small time feature and then my "primary" window for working on a feature.
    by _fat_santa
  • Claude comes with very nice hook-api you can use it to customise notifications and allow tmux window to blink or to come to the front when Claude needs your attention
    by meitham
  • As I was traveling by trains and planes with finicky internet I started using mosh + tmux + Tailscale + VPs to run my agents

    Curious how herdr or agent-manager fits into this remote-dev with intermittent connections experience

    by vladgur
  • I used exactly this setup before (mosh + tmux + Tailscale + VPS), so maybe I can help. Both tools are terminal UIs, so they fit naturally in what you have: you run them inside tmux on the VPS, and mosh handles the bad connection like it does for everything else. But honestly they don't change much when the connection is bad, because the UI still goes through the connection. This is one of the reasons I built ShellTeam (github.com/sebderhy/shellteam): the sessions stay on the VPS and the UI is a web app, so when I lose internet on a train I just reload the page and everything is still there. I'm obviously biased, but for intermittent connections I think a web UI works better than a TUI over mosh.
    by sebderhy
  • Shameless plug for my project, which is a bit different.

    I had the problem of crashing terminals due to OOM kills and wanted to switch to a more lightweight terminal. Also I had too many of them and couldn't find the right one any more.

    I thought, why not build one yourself. The result:

    https://github.com/ThePixelPilgrim/kabelsalat

    It has GTK tabbed, (almost) transparently tmux-backed terminals (so quitting or crashing the app and starting it up again restores the state) in colored, named groups.

    I recently added Wayland app embedding to run Chrome side by side with the terminal, local to each group, but this is still a bit shaky.

    Would be nice if someone would test drive it and give me some feedback. :)

    by luckystarr
  • Isn't this what https://www.superlogical.com/ supposed to accomplish?
    by lucianmarin
  • yes but if you don't create a company you can't get funding.
    by figmert
  • Different scope, as far as I can tell from their site: they describe a multiplexer for all work, spanning remote hosts, sandboxes, CI, production systems and shared terminals. This is a Go binary that drives tmux on the machine you're already on, and every session it creates is an ordinary tmux session you can attach to without it. Much smaller bet, and it stops where tmux stops.
    by yoanwaidev
  • This looks really good, but for me the timing of seeing agent-manager is bad: I read about the similar Herdr on HN several days ago and I have completely changed my dev setup for the better.

    I have always been a traditional simple command line tool kind of developer (I am an old man, old habbits die hard!) but I recommend at least a one day experiment with tools like agent-manager and/or Herdr that integrate tools like Claude Code and OpenCode into an integrated work environment.

    I have been hacking on my own Emacs based agentic coding and work environment (so much fun!) but my recent experience with Herdr has been much more productive.

    Anyway, the docs for agent-manager look good, I look forward to reading HNer’s experience with it.

    by mark_l_watson
  • Thanks for sharing your experience with Herdr! I've been considering taking the plunge for a few weeks - going to do a one day experiment today.
    by urnicus
  • Do you know how does Herdr compare to native “claude agents” view?
    by aranelsurion
  • “How does this differ from”…

    For all of these tools, now, there are many. After I built my own agent sandboxer[0] I went so far as to create a site dedicated to 36 other similar projects / approaches: https://pleasedonotescape.com/

    0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre

    by petesergeant
  • OPs tool is not a sandboxer and isn’t like the other projects in your list. OP is an agent multiplexer, of which there also are many similar projects, but not a sandboxer.
    by cobolcomesback
  • This is great! It would be really helpful if it had some measure of the number of users (stars?) and a contributor count. It's pretty hard to determine which of these projects are going to stick around. Total length of time under active development and percentage of code committed by agents would also be informative.
    by mkl
  • How does this compare to something like herdr which does all of this?

    https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr

    by aghuang
  • yes exactly my thought. They're quite the same, a feature more a feature less
    by lakardion
  • I started using herdr last night, and was able to get a workflow I've wanted to set up for a while working, which is to be able to talk to a managing agent in my car and check on / update claude sessions. It uses Telnyx SIP and LiveKit cloud, and I'm using Qwen3.6 35B-A3B quite successfully as the voice layer router. It's still very early but it works quite well.

    If you decide to try it out, please make sure to read the security implications. There is no sandboxing added as of yet, and guardrails are pretty minimal.

    https://github.com/jonesy827/mate

    by jonesy827
  • I tried herdr recently, and I missed many tmux features I really liked.

    tmux has a better `prefix-[` mode where you 1) can do visual selection using line/block mode 2) you can use `o` to switch to other side (just like vim) 3) it pauses/freezes the state of the output so you have time to capture

    In herdr, its very basic and incomplete if you're a vim/nvim/tmux power user. And if you're in a TUI that shows some text and then hides it, its hard to do the selection in herdr before it disappears.

    To give herdr credit, I did like it's `prefix-e` which opens the history in vim so you can you real selection utils.

    As I was looking at herdr, I found there many other solutions that were like it built on the more robust tmux. I am still evaluating, but there are plenty of solutions that have hooks to observe what's going on in agents in other panes/windows like herdr.

    I like the Primeagen's `tmux sessionizer` style solutions for nvim to work with git worktrees that each agent may be in. And I like the tmux-agent-sidebar.

    by darcyparker
  • There seem to be a lot of these sorts of tools popping up but it’s not clear to me the added value they bring in over using plain tmux (or any other “normal” session multiplexer).

    Can someone who uses one of these agent-specific multiplexers share their experience and reasoning for reaching for / building these? What makes this better than a normal multiplexer? I am asking in earnest; I just don’t understand but I want to.

    by hamaluik
  • My main reason for herdr over tmux is the priority queue of agents requiring intervention.
    by skinfaxi
  • I built yoloAI, which is a sandboxer so it uses tmux to keep the agent alive inside. Since I can just reattach to them or use VS code tunnels, I don't really have a need for a multiplexer, though.
    by kstenerud
  • https://bower.sh/you-might-not-need-tmux
    by Marlinski
  • - I get OS level notifications when the agent is ready.

    - I don't need to use TMUX's wonky keyboard shortcuts

    - I moved off of TMUX anyway, when ssh-ing into remote servers became 'not a thing'

    - automatic coding session management, like auto resume, layout manamgement, etc. out of the box, without setting up TMUX, which could be a wormhole for some, by the time you fix mouse scrolling, cut/paste, etc...

    I'm currently using CMUX, and been pretty happy with it it at this time, but loving the evolution of all these tools

    by taude
  • I've been using herdr for a couple of weeks. The only real advantage is that it makes the agent status glanceable in the sidebar, which can be nice if you don't want to cycle through your tmux panes to check if something's blocked or complete. Other than that, it's kind of just tmux (which is nice, I like tmux).
    by dhruvmittal
  • I build one, an inhouse one for myself. I think it's a worth doing and see if it works for you. Especially for someone who works independently most of the time. I get it to follow and support my working style, workflow and idiosyncrasies. I started out because I wanted something that queues my work serially for each project so I can work on main and I can type what I want to do in it instead of writing to an ever-growing TODO list.

    I then make it show icons and indicators for blockers, ready sessions that need attention, TODO lists that include notifications and actions (because it's so easy to miss things while working on/with many sessions). Shows costs (loop coordinator and non-LC costs, by day, etc) so I can optimize costs.

    It's fun, a learning experience and it's more productive. With excellent SOTA and coding agents now, we should be building tools to improve our work even more than before. Try it.

    by hboon
  • I’ve been using herdr lately and before that I was using zellij and before that tmux and before that gnu screen

    For me the main advantage of herdr is that when I have the codex integration activated, herdr will keep track of the codex session ids and automatically restore them after restart

    With the other multiplexers I had to create a separate tool that would save/restore layout/tabs/panes/session ids. And I had to run it manually. With herdr it just works, almost out of the box

    Oh, it’s also very nice that you can create groups of tabs, so it’s easier to organize if you have more than 3-4 terminal sessions open (I usually keep at least 3 tabs, each split into an agent pane and a zsh pane)

    And lastly, mouse scroll support is a lot better. I’ve had many issues with scrolling codex’s output. tmux and zellij’s scrolling wouldn’t play nicely with codex’s output, but herdr seems to work very well

    by nico