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.
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.
> 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.
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'!
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.
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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 .
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
There's 30 million of these and they all look basically identical.
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.
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.
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
[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.
So I wouldn’t blame the commenter above.
Probably a good idea if you work with sensitive data (and you’re already on Zero Data Retention)
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!
If agents didn’t exist, would herdr provide a nice UX as a terminal multiplexer?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.