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?
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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.
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 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?
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!
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 do and test it for you.
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
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.
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).
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)
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'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.
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.
don't quite understand how typing it into a popup instead of an agent makes it revolutionary
This space seems to be heating up, everyone wanting to build the single pane of glass for agentic work.
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
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)
I have more faith in team behind Rex so not putting the time in for Herdr.
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
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
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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.