How does this compare to something like herdr which does all of this?

https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr

yes exactly my thought. They're quite the same, a feature more a feature less

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.

Same here, I do not see the point of herdr if you're already using tmux. It's very easy to add hooks to your favorite harness to display a notification in tmux when it's done working.

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

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.

Do you know how does Herdr compare to native “claude agents” view?

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.

do so! I'm quite happy with how it works. I'm using it with Ghostty and it works flawlessly. I have OOM from time to time but that is just me doing too many things. Never had I had any UI issues with it, and the UI showing the current agent status separately from the workspaces themselves is really useful

Finding it a bit wild that I've been working on something somewhat similar for a few weeks now.

I had the same experience, but someone calmed me down by saying "we're all working on solving this problem."

As the great Nas once rapped:

    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done

Yeah I guess so. At least the feature sets are also fairly diverse; putting them all together would create a whole other beast.

I’ve been working on something like this for a few years. Literally.

And I’ve noticed that my hobby project went from being a niche toy to something everyone was independently building almost overnight. My guess is that AI now makes it trivial for people to get started.

In any case, I since decided it would be better to focus on building my tool for myself rather than releasing it, like I was originally planning to do.

I'm seeing a lot of this across all sorts of apps right now. We're at a sort of cambrian explosion point for software.

I too built my own equivalent of this (belfry.robgough.net). I take it as a good thing, we're all using these tools and coming to similar conclusions.

I suspect over time it'll settle down, once we've gotten comfortable with the new ways of working and found the new normal.

Nice, but I love my agentic IDE app. I prefer normal gui over terminal. Good luck!

Normal GUI runs local. I have mosh running from Blink on my iPhone to my server and I can continue months long session of AI

herdr's a whole runtime, own multiplexer, plugins, socket api. mine sits on tmux and doesn't try to replace it, sessions stay normal tmux sessions.

overlap on the status sidebar is real. two things I lean on that I couldn't find a key for over there: space on a blocked agent types the answer into its pane without attaching, and ctrl+r opens its repo as full-file diffs where a comment on a line goes back to that agent as a prompt. herdr's socket api can push text into a pane, so the first one is scriptable at least. correct me if I missed something.

mouse and windows, herdr's ahead.

To be clear on the GUI point, since my last reply here answered a different question: this is a terminal tool and it won't convert you. The reason I stay in one is that the agents already live in terminals, so the manager is a view over what's running rather than a second place things live.

Isn't this what https://www.superlogical.com/ supposed to accomplish?

yes but if you don't create a company you can't get funding.

You don't need funding or teams to make these types of tools anymore, they are all basically engineering as marketing for running agents in the cloud, or some other value add/funnel into something that could make money.

codex(or whatever they're calling the bundled desktop experience) = selling inference

claude code = selling inference

conductor = selling hosted agents

superlogical = selling... something

I recommend everyone build their own. It's fun, you'll learn a bit, and assuming you work as a software engineer the dogfooding is built in. I built ouijit as my own example of this: https://ouijit.com & https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit (note that I am not trying to make money, just free as in libre AND beer)

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.

How is this different from https://github.com/asheshgoplani/agent-deck ?

These types of responses are always so low value, they should be auto filtered out. How is Claude Code different than Codex, how is x different from y, etc. Read the repo and figure it our for yourself, good grief.

also - not everything needs to be unique. I think that is a leftover of some VC mind washing "you need a moat!". Many things can be great, and do somewhat similar things.

Because of the way humans learn, and everyone’s reference point being different (e.g. I know this, I don’t know that), this is very valuable if the author can provide a good explanation. That’s why there are books/docs like “rust for rubyists” and similar. I love finding these explanations later. Not everything needs to be researched yourself if you can get a clear/concise answer from the person trying to share/excite/get feedback on their project.

At that point this who submission should be auto filtered out since there are dozen of these and they are barely distinguishable except for couple of opinioned choices.

agent-deck was the first one I actually tried to adopt, landed a couple of commits in it. wanted it to be the one.

what I kept missing was answering an agent without attaching to it. so space on a blocked one, type, enter, and it lands in that pane. on a project row it spawns a new agent already working on what you typed. the other half is review, ctrl+r opens what it changed as whole files with the diff tinted, c comments a line, C sends the notes into the pane.

deck does plenty I don't, worktrees, cost, forking. different bets.

Nice

“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

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.

Yes, I'm well aware

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.

But that would reflect poorly on my own project ;-) More seriously you're absolutely right, I'll see if I can find some time this weekend to get that done

Stars are a very very poor metric to measure against.

There are projects that have no stars that may be great and projects that have a high star count and are absolute garbage (because you can fake stars)

I tend to look at the commits, contributors, closed/open issue count ratio and the changelog.

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

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.

I've tested out just about every tool like this, and ended up coding my own, it is really minimal though.

The primary reason people reach for these tools are two to three reasons:

1. Tmux does not natively show agent statuses of agents / notify you when one needs input. Helpful when you have a huge list of small things to fix: I just spin up N agents in parallel to handle all of them, then I go over and review.

2. Tmux does not handle worktree handling. If you wanna make changes in parallel you cannot have two agents make db migrations at the same time. The way to solve for this is to have them work on two different worktrees with separate environments, ports etc.

3. Tmux tree view is not super beautiful, especially for viewing agents.

I built this as a tmux plugin since I don't really want to opt-out of tmux as a whole, especially since I like my keybindings there.

https://github.com/Ymirke/tmux-agent-switcher

In your experience using your plugin (and the other tools that do something similar like herdr), does it make doing a larger volume of work feel more manageable? In my experience thus far, surfacing/managing session state is only part of the issue, context switching between them is another entirely and feels like the real productivity bottleneck for me

You're spot on here.

If you're truly multi-tasking with this type of setup it feels more like "tiktok coding", "brainrot coding", or any other term that should be used for it.

I'm pretty sure we're moving away from it, the agent you interact with via voice or typing will go to a higher and higher abstraction level, and you won't have to effectively micro-manage them.

This looks nice, but I think a screenshot or three in the README would help bring it to life better

Great input. Added a screenshot to the readme:

https://github.com/Ymirke/tmux-agent-switcher

Please continue developing this I’m sick of all these one-offs that escape the mature good tooling we already have.

> The way to solve for this is to have them work on two different worktrees with separate environments, ports

What are you using for the environment part? Containers?

Yes! The project I'm working most on has a dev environment that runs a compose witin two scripts: a setup.sh and a run.sh script.

setup.sh figures out which ports are available and changes .env files accordingly. Run.sh runs the actual setup.

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

yeah herdr has completely replaced my tmux usage

herdr seems more stable than psmux/tmux for windows.

- 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

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).

I added a hook to Claude and Codex where they play a frog ribbit sound when they're done cooking.

I should probably download different types of frog sounds for different agents though.

I don’t get this argument that’s soooo easy for add a window marker to tmux windows that updates with a Claude hook.

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.

My main reason for herdr over tmux is the priority queue of agents requiring intervention.

Most of the AI tools people are building have little to zero value.

If you're making valuable tools, anthropic, openai, or one of the other big players in the space will hire you/buy you out and then they will release the tool themselves.

I'm getting really tired of everyone doing their own special rain dances and then acting like they made it rain.

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.

cmux.com

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. :)

Am I the only one who prefers a full on GUI (eg Claude Desktop)?

Yes, I've found that T3 Code fills this gap nicely.

You're not, and this won't convert you. The reason I stay in a terminal is that the agents already live in one, so a TUI is a view over what's running rather than a second place things live. If your agent already runs in a GUI, that argument doesn't apply to you.

I'm going to be blunt. I don't care about any more AI tools.

No need to comment.

No, I think there is. Too many people building AI tools. I see it in my org. Tons of low value work but the ai sycophant is telling everyone "you're a genius, this is great" so they continue.

We built a "fire and forget" agent that's supposed to complete whole jira tasks or that we're supposed to be able to call from slack. You put a ticket in to "make random.md document" and it creates a ton of unit tests and makes "notrandom.md" and says "success". Tons of engineers pulling plugins/skills/etc and injecting them in places they don't belong, lots with blatantly wrong info. People making whole frameworks and tools around their AI workflows, but they're worthless, anything that made sense gets released a week after they finish building from anthropic/openai/etc.

It's ai psychosis from c-level down.

I'm tired.

100% agree. AI isn't hacking, it's a completely different crowd. So much front page space is wasted talking about the latest version, some funding controversy, or these useless add-on tools.

And this is the shit we're seeing in public.

Can't tell you how much garbage AI tooling is being built within my org. Whole teams spinning their wheels basically rebuilding claude code because execs are obsessed with "dark factory". Individuals building plugins/skills/mcps that are duplicated or just plain wrong (why do I see so many skills/plugins telling our agents to use main branch when we've always used master???).

I've yanked MOST tools OUT of my claude code/opencode/codex. MCPs to centralize auth to our knowledge base, jira, gitlab. Then a singular short simple markdown file in each project/repo. When brainstorming, maybe I'll create a one off .md that I'll delete once the thing is built/implemented.

I'm tired.

Everybody has a TUI for running Claude Code these days, huh?

There's also https://github.com/code-yeongyu/oh-my-openagent which is very active

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

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?

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.

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!

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

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.

I don’t get the point of these.

Ghostty has tabs which show the icons for the terminal TUI. You can just look at those for the status.

Same with windows terminal, and you can use either of those to have tiling.

I really want something like this but maybe a plugin to stick TMUX would be a better option for those of us already using TMUX…

This looks good, but I prefer a desktop application like Codex (wish I could run Claude Code in Codex lol)