8 ms·

Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

leoc 1mo ago
So I won’t have switch to Fchte or Schlirmchr?
nlh 1mo ago
I am a HUGE herdr fan - discovered it a few months ago and it's exactly what I need for my workflow. Thousands of others have discovered it as well, which is awesome. I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is. Here's hoping this one's different... (PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)
- tamimio 1mo ago
  Yeah, it’s great but with this, it’s probably the time to find an alternative, I probably can see where this will be in a year or so.
  - pecheny 1mo ago
    why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)
    - sarky-litso 1mo ago
      I can't tell if this is sarcasm but in case its not, being capable of doing something and having the desire and resources to do it are not the same thing
      - inigyou 1mo ago
        It's a management tool for multiple superintelligent agents, right? Just tell one of them to fork herdr so VC can't make it worse on purpose.
      - pecheny 1mo ago
        Not sarcasm at all. I think you might overestimate the time and effort needed for this. When you maintain a _personal_ fork with no users except yourself, you only ever need to change something when you encounter a bug or need a new feature. E.g. I have personal forks of mosh and cmux, each took maybe 1 hour of my time total? I found this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 resonating with me, except I obviously don't do stuff like "nightly cron to sync with main", I just never touch the code unless it breaks or I want a new feature.
        lawrencechen 1mo ago
        Very curious about your cmux fork, any chance you could link the repo? (Maker of cmux here :))
        pecheny 1mo ago
        Oh wow :) thank you for cmux, it's a great project! The code is here: https://code.pecheny.me/pecheny/cmux https://code.pecheny.me/pecheny/cmux or if you prefer github, https://github.com/alexander-pecheny/cmux https://github.com/alexander-pecheny/cmux I think I only added two features, pasting images over mosh (ssh already worked but not mosh) and a compact version of sidebar. The story behind the fork is: I had a bug with raycast, filed a PR that fixed it for me https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/2435 https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/2435, a different fix made it into next release that for me didn't work. Maybe the problem was on my side, but at this point it was easier to fork the working version than debug further.
- an0malous 1mo ago
  It’s literally the VC playbook, the whole point of the funding is to undermine competitors with subsidized/free products and then raise prices/enshittify. Anyone who thinks it’ll be different this time is fooling themselves.
- scubbo 1mo ago
  > I am a big YC fan in general Genuine question - why?
- tomhow 1mo ago
  > YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification It doesn't have to be that way. YC partners are supportive if you just want to take the YC funding and nothing more, keeping the team small and just focusing on making the product better for customers. Indeed YC advises against taking VC if you don't need it.
  - abirch 1mo ago
    Yes there are companies such as Streak. It's possible to pay back early funders so it's a win-win.
- Fervicus 1mo ago
  > Here's hoping this one's different... It won't be.
EGreg 1mo ago
Wow, congrats! Can you discuss how you got YCombinator to select your open source project? I know they sometimes fund open source… I’ve been building several large platforms since 2011 but I have never considered applying like that. Would something like this qualify: https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud
- rrr_oh_man 1mo ago
  the secret sauce is traction
humblepie 1mo ago
Okay, back to tmux it is then.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- lrvick 1mo ago
  I am going to be PRing herdr to stagex as it is my daily driver. This will give it a totally independent release process with multiple parties bootstrapping, reproducing, and signing deterministic binaries for it alongside our tmux releases. We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu. As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release. Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better. My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.
- dgunay 1mo ago
  Over the last year I ended up duct taping a lot of functionality onto tmux to get what these new age multiplexers set out to do (session launch, live agent status, etc). And it works, but it definitely feels like duct tape. I'm not sure the tmux project wants to evolve to support this natively so for now herdr seems like one of the best open and forkable options available. Considering how little I've had to really touch my tmux setup after getting it going I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world if the FOSS community maintains a deshittified fork of herdr, should it come to that.
  - natsucks 1mo ago
    I've been wondering what the point of a lot of these new multiplexer projects are when tmux is so extensible. I'd be curious to see eactly what you've done. Care to share a tmux config?
ValentineC 1mo ago
> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem. I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.
- yoyohello13 1mo ago
  FUD, can’t take investment when your project actually enforces user freedom.
- rajangdavis 1mo ago
  Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code
  - spudlyo 1mo ago
    Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.
    - rajangdavis 1mo ago
      I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money. I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation. I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.
      - spudlyo 1mo ago
        In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.
dominotw 1mo ago
wtf is "runtime"
- albertgoeswoof 1mo ago
  What does stays open mean
  - fwip 1mo ago
    It means the headline was vomited out by an LLM.
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      It's a tool for managing 20 LLM agents at the same time isn't it? They know their audience loves this slop.
rvz 1mo ago
Quick question: Would you have actually donated to Herdr if they were asking for donations? I don't think any of you would have, unless stated otherwise. So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0. You have to pay and support the tools you use or else the VCs will do it for you so you can't complain when scenarios like this keep happening.
- applfanboysbgon 1mo ago
  Yep. It's funny how much open source maximalists harm their own cause. Everything must be "free", ergo everything must be VC or big tech backed because free doesn't put bread on the table, so in the end devs just put more power in the hands of corporations and less power in the hands of themselves and other independent devs/small businesses, and then have the gall to complain when everything gets enshittified.
- hx8 1mo ago
  I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. Starting an open source project and using it to attract VC funding is one path.
  - rvz 1mo ago
    > I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. This software was "free" (as in libre) and costed $0 and until now, it was licensed under AGPL 3. But contrary to one common misbelief in open source and free software, the maintenance is not free at all. > The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. In the case of this project which took off, why would you expect the maintainer to work on the project for free?
hx8 1mo ago
I switched from tmux to Herdr about six weeks ago. It's a great bit of software, the UI is focused on switching between multiple agents quickly. I run Herdr to keep my opencode instances well managed, and it also works great for having a few terminals opens next to your agent. I find myself keeping opencode sessions open for longer like what happens with Codex and Claude code, which is great if I need to revisit a context to do some follow up work. I'm genuinely excited to see if the creators can bring even more value to the application. If you're worried about enshittification I wouldn't be. It's relatively basic open source software that runs locally. A perfect candidate for a fork if the base app starts degrading.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 1mo ago
  Honestly, how are you guys running multiple agents, presumably with them all writing code? I find myself to be a huge bottleneck, having to do technical design and design reviews, to make sure they're actually working on the right things. I feel like there's not enough coding work to justify multiple agents, that part doesn't take long, and then it's back to design again.
  - frumiousirc 1mo ago
    > I find myself to be a huge bottleneck, having to do technical design and design reviews, to make sure they're actually working on the right things. I find this depends on the LLMs being used and the person using them and the problems being solved. Like, Fable can be sent off to do some big thing for a long while and I find myself getting bored and move over to push on some other thing. Or, while reading a paper I have a string of follow up questions and ideas and launch them via web or CLI agent. Or I bounce between multiple chores in different packages, each of which is fast for an LLM and a low cognitive burden for me. Then other times, something needs my full, ongoing and serial attention where the LLM turn is only a minor element. I'll use the brief LLM interludes to get up, walk around a bit, stretch and think. As for Herdr, it seems nice when I tried it a few weeks ago. But, I'm surprised it is getting so much attention (kudos). Like many people, I've developed more than one work-alike before Herdr hit the scene. They were based on tmux which I have concluded I simply detest. In the end, I made a little agent hook script that speaks to Kitty terminal and that plus Kitty and a stable SSH persistent connection gives 80% of what I was looking for. I do still like the "control panel" aspect of my past and herdr's tries. Adding that would get me another 10%.
asadm 1mo ago
I am guessing this now directly competes with mitchellh's multiplexer / Superlogical.
- SJMG 1mo ago
  I just wouldn't bet against Mitchell. He doesn't need the money. He does it for the love of it.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - trymas 1mo ago
    Though what I genuinely don't understand is, why then Mitchel needs funding? If he needs funding - why accept it from weird contraversial figures? He has the freedom of choice, like no other.
    - nlitened 1mo ago
      What are some examples of uncontroversial figures who would be willing to offer funding, in your opinion?
      - trymas 1mo ago
        Why not Mitchel himself? Without anyone else. Seeding superlogical wouldn’t make a dent to his “10 digit bank account”. Probably not much more expensive than airplane hobby.
    - rpunkfu 1mo ago
      Reach
    - jeffyaw 1mo ago
      why even take funding at all?
barapa 1mo ago
[flagged]
kar1181 1mo ago
Oh man - herdr is great. This will not be net good. Sigh.
tyleo 1mo ago
Tbh it doesn’t bother me entirely. I love this tool so much I’d pay for it. VC funding can enshitify things but it can also improve them. Here’s hoping for the latter.
user- 1mo ago
Congrats to Can! I am using Herdr and i think its a great tool. A modern solo dev success story , very inspirational. I see some negative comments here that I could understand why funding scares them when it comes to their open source tool but like.. atleast congratulate the guy.
- Johnny_Bonk 1mo ago
  Yeah I was using cmux but it was Mac only and now I run herdr on my wsl and tunnel in from Mac and it’s awesome that it just mirrors everything. I like it and congrats to the founder
ahmadyan 1mo ago
Congrats to Can on the pre-seed funding. genuinely wishing you all the best. The terminal multiplexer / multi-agent coding space is getting very crowded. YC alone has funded many competing startups in this space: herdr, Superset, cmux, Emdash, Orca, Bullet, Conductor (Conductor was in YC before pivoting from chat->coding). I’m probably missing a few, and that’s before counting companies outside YC such as Superlogical and Agentastic.dev (by yours truly). One thing I find particularly interesting is the role of open source in this market. A lot of these products started open source (i assume as a tactical way to gain traction and build a community). But after the early traction phase or raise funding, the incentives seem to change. Being open source by itself is not a product differentiator in this market. The features required for string positioning (orchestration, cloud, custom agents, enterprise features, hosted infrastructure, etc.) often end up either closed source or available only through the hosted product. That makes me wonder how much developers actually value OSS for this category. How much does it matter to you whether your IDE or coding environment is open source? Is OSS important because you want to inspect the code, fork it, self-host it, avoid vendor lock-in, or simply because you trust open-source developer tools more? Or, for desktop software like IDEs is open source mostly a nice-to-have rather than a requirement? So I’m curious where HN lands on this
- devin 1mo ago
  They will all fail unless they’re acquired, which is its own kind of failure.
- conartist6 1mo ago
  There exist also competitors not funded by YC, like me. I won't be on any of the lists because I'm not courting agents, I'm courting humans. For me OSS is a weapon to be wielded. By making perfect software that cannot be improved upon, and making known my ownership of it, I'm am defending "embrace extend extinguish" attacks that would otherwise be damaging to me. Those attacks rely on being able to undercut a product's position in the market with a similarly positioned product that can be just slightly better and/or cheaper.
- sharts 1mo ago
  Indeed and once the funding comes in with more chefs in the kitchen the startups start losing touch and focus on funneling users to a platform instead of just improving the core product.
Gooblebrai 1mo ago
I thought the A2A protocol from Google would solve this of our personal agents speaking with company agents
- htrp 1mo ago
  90% certain A2A is dead....
kristjansson 1mo ago
As a relatively recent herdr user, I’ll say (1) congratulations and (2) the thing that was most attractive was the seeming orthogonality of the tool. It sits apart, interfaces with subordinate programs in a few clearly delineated ways, and integrates them only as much as the user desires. Critically, “no integration just show me the terminal output of my program” is an option, and a useful one! I appreciate that discipline and respect for your user in the current tool, and hope to be a paying customer of a similarly values-aligned business you’ll build on top of it!
vehemenz 1mo ago
I've been using Herdr for a while now, but I'd like a multiplexer that's also a meta-harness that I can connect to remotely. I know others have setups that work, I just haven't quite figured it out yet.
- asadm 1mo ago
  i just ssh to my machine (from phone etc) and run `herdr` to resume.
- threecheese 1mo ago
  Moshi has an integration with Herdr; you can connect to your herdr sessions over mosh, your touches register as mouse clicks in the UI (which is minimally rendered above the shell), and there’s a shortcut bar which can issue herdr-keymapped commands. It’s not open source, and costs a few bucks, but it works well and has live Claude/Codex/etc notifications if you are willing to install a hook daemon on your hosts with homebrew. I was looking for batteries-included “code from my iPhone” after trying a bunch of self-hosted stuff, now I connect to my Macs over Tailscale and get dropped right into multiplexer sessions with rich status notifications. https://getmoshi.app/ https://getmoshi.app/
  - bardsore 1mo ago
    I tried Moshi. Some things I did not like - Despite the name, using mosh is a paid feature - It was not clear what is and isn't a paid feature when using the app for the first time (after selecting which server to connect to, when you select which terminal/chat to connect to there's initially a counter that says 20/20 which decreases every time you connect) - If you pair your phone to the server for push notifications a bunch of info regarding the chat is sent to their servers to produce the push (naturally), this makes it unsuitable for me at my job at least. IMO it would be sufficient to just get a "Agent needs your attention" push. All in all, I did not find it worth it compared to using mosh or SSH in Termux. I have a colleague who loves Moshi though, for him its perfect. Among other things he likes the dictation.
- durdn 1mo ago
  My same line of thinking and apparently of several others, turns out herdr has a plug-in for this: https://github.com/nikok6/herdr-mirror https://github.com/nikok6/herdr-mirror which is close to what I need.
throwaway613746 1mo ago
[dead]
Waterluvian 1mo ago
I haven’t seen one of those classic Herdr/Herdly tech names in a while now.
foxtrot8672 1mo ago
could just host it on the cloud?
lonesword 1mo ago
Congratulations! I came across herdr a few weeks ago and I've been daily driving it ever since. I've tried a few other tools like Emdash and Superset but Herdr is the only one that did a decent job rendering Claude code UI and didn't randomly crash and could run on a remote server.
ernsheong 1mo ago
Ironically a lot of YC hate despite the fact that we are literally in their forum.
- xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago
  Like the articles, hate the influence of VC on open source. Even if it stays open it still gets ruined. See Bun for an example.
  - rwz 1mo ago
    I don't see how Bun is "ruined". In fact, I personally see Bun as example of the opposite — Rust rewrite seems like a huge success across the board. I'm personally using the 1.4 canary (the rust rewrite version) and definitely plan on continuing using it in my future projects.
    - notsmarthuh 1mo ago
      [flagged]
  - jeffyaw 1mo ago
    just made oam.js and released it yesterday. check er out. https://oamjs.org https://oamjs.org optimized for typescript and running js/ts mcp servers.
- loveparade 1mo ago
  I don't think it's about YC specifically, more about VC-driven enshittification of open source software in general.
jdorfman 1mo ago
Congrats Can. Love your product, it has become the default way to orchestrate agents in my terminal.
loveparade 1mo ago
Oh no, I was using it. What's a good replacement? Guess I'll go back to tmux.
- yoyohello13 1mo ago
  I’m a fan of zellij
Taek 1mo ago
This title is killing me. "The runtime stays open" is such a heavy, attention grabbing sentence, it's all I can stare at on the front page. It's the type of writing that makes me hate working with LLMs, because it's so powerful at monopolizing my attention, and makes it difficult for me to focus on any of the other words on the page (whether the front page, or the comments page).
- moomoo11 1mo ago
  it’s ok Claude we can see you
- yoyohello13 1mo ago
  You should read the Herdr front page. Is so full of AIism it hurts my head.
- joegibbs 1mo ago
  “The noun verbs.” is such an incredibly Claudeish sentence. The other models don’t do that stuff. I’d say it’s actually biggest tell for Claude writing.
behole 1mo ago
Congrats on momentum! Well earned. Love Herdr.
abofh 1mo ago
You've joined an accelerator, not gone public, of course you're not ready to rug pull
DonHopkins 1mo ago
If they just stayed opn they could reinvest the penultimate e in calling themselves Herder.
phrmendes 1mo ago
Thanks god I didn't replace tmux
smagnuso 1mo ago
I thought I'd share that hydra recently added support for herdr directly. It is an agent multiplexer of its own, but can directly create herdr tabs for sessions: https://github.com/smagnuso/hydra-acp https://github.com/smagnuso/hydra-acp
tmzt 1mo ago
A nice little asciinema demo would be helpful on the TUI page. I should be able to see what it is, how it presents the contained agents, etc. I've been evaluating a few of these (and built one into another project I was working on, almost by accident), and am mostly looking for a frontend agnostic, terminal only (not harness) which can submit instructions to agents one line at at time with rate-limiting. I was also surprised by tmux being built on shared memory when I tried to route it over a vsock to a VM. One of the annoyances with tmux is it's failure to forward environment changes to the individual tabs (such as an option when attaching), or allow for something like a ssh-agent forwarder (shouldn't be built in though).
- mastazi 1mo ago
  in the herdr homepage near the top there is an interactive demo that responds to your mouse clicks
krypttr 1mo ago
Can anyone tell me how is this different than tmux?
- mcintyre1994 1mo ago
  Mostly it’s the agents view, it’ll show the status of and let you quickly jump to all the agents you have running in any pane/tab. It also has a default config that’s much easier to use than tmux, letting you use the mouse or simpler (IMO) keyboard shortcuts Built in worktrees are nice too.
  - krypttr 1mo ago
    I guess I have to download and try. It does not sound too exciting to me.
    - mcintyre1994 1mo ago
      It also might just not be much use for you, especially if you’ve been using tmux for a long time and have a set up you like.
- kkapelon 1mo ago
  https://herdr.dev/compare/ https://herdr.dev/compare/
porker 1mo ago
herdr users (and all the other terminal multiplexer users): what am I missing? I use cmux because I like tabbed terminals on macOS grouped by project, saves messing with our daft window management. What is it that makes herdr et al so popular with LLM users?
- Oras 1mo ago
  I loved using cmux for several weeks until I saw the ram usage.
  - lawrencechen 1mo ago
    Totally fair, maker of cmux here. We fixed many RAM usage issues (latest version is 0.64.22), and also added an activity monitor to see how much RAM/CPU coding agents are taking. My cmux has been running with 136 workspaces and 218 terminals, and has been hovering around 5.7 GB. Granted, the theoretical RAM minimum for this number of terminals is around 1-1.5 GB before real scrollback, so we definitely have more work to do.
    - Oras 1mo ago
      Thanks, good to know. I installed the update and will check it out again. If it helps, the main reason I love cmux is how can I manage my projects into folders, I have fast access to all the projects which made my life a lot easier working in the terminal. I can also have coding, test, monitoring spilt in one tab per project.
- kkapelon 1mo ago
  https://herdr.dev/compare/ https://herdr.dev/compare/
  - porker 1mo ago
    It answers the "What" but not the "Why?"
    - 1mo ago
khalic 1mo ago
Congrats to the herdr team! Please don't abandon the open source part of the business when the cash starts flowing... every open source project that does a bait'n'switch is a stab at the viability of open source as a whole
- vrighter 1mo ago
  If they take vc funding, it's only a matter of when, not if. They all say that.
gitowiec 1mo ago
What's the purpose of this project? Only to close the lid and let agent work in the background? Really that's what I found useful on project's homepage
- ubercore 1mo ago
  I dropped it in to replace zellij, and get better agent integration in the process.
hrishikesh-s 1mo ago
I only heard about Herdr recently and was pleasantly surprised that I had invented the same thing 6 months ago as an emacs package called Magnus :)
la_fayette 1mo ago
I started using Herdr and I really like it. Since the main features I wanted are already there, I have no issue with the commercialization. I still wonder how this can be turned into a profitable business. It'll be really interesting to follow Herdr's future. All the best to the founder!
level87 1mo ago
I've tried Herdr a couple of times, and just can't get into it. I think what's off putting is another layer of keyboard shortcuts over my terminal...I don't see what it's doing that Wezterm and a bunch of splits does anyway? I'm almost certainly missing the point.
- SkyArrow 1mo ago
  For me, herdr's benefits over terminal splits are: 1. Surfacing agents which are ready for further input 2. Letting you jump quickly to said agents 3. SSH session persistence, as I work on a beefy devbox at work. tmux also offers this. I often need to juggle several streams of work at $job in parallel - such are the expectations. Like you though, I'd much prefer to use my terminal directly with the indirection of an additional multiplexer like herdr or tmux - lower latency, easier scrollback & copying. Session persistence can be solved by zmx [1]. Points 1 and 2 however are concerned with tracking the state of and navigating to parallel agents. I'm thinking about creating a TUI or SwiftUI app to handle those points in the way I like, but the challenge of integrating such an app with zmx and kitty to jump to the right panes both locally and over a devbox is a little daunting. Plus, I've found my devbox doesn't play too well with `ControlMaster auto` SSH config suggested by the zmx docs. [1] https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx
DrStartup 1mo ago
that sucks, time to look for a new one
gaiagraphia 1mo ago
Spooky. Just set it up last night after ragequitting my own attempt. Good luck!
piratebroadcast 1mo ago
I have a bit of a contrarian thought here, but I tried Herdr and I didn't like it. To me, it kind of proved the opposite point it intended, in that agent orchestration actually belongs at the terminal level. I'd like to see for example a fork of Ghostty become the agent orchestration control room.
- pheewma 1mo ago
  They have this already. Both cmux and supacode use libghostty in the backend.

leoc 1mo ago

So I won’t have switch to Fchte or Schlirmchr?

nlh 1mo ago

I am a HUGE herdr fan - discovered it a few months ago and it's exactly what I need for my workflow. Thousands of others have discovered it as well, which is awesome. I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is. Here's hoping this one's different... (PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)

tamimio 1mo ago
Yeah, it’s great but with this, it’s probably the time to find an alternative, I probably can see where this will be in a year or so.
- pecheny 1mo ago
  why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)
  - sarky-litso 1mo ago
    I can't tell if this is sarcasm but in case its not, being capable of doing something and having the desire and resources to do it are not the same thing
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      It's a management tool for multiple superintelligent agents, right? Just tell one of them to fork herdr so VC can't make it worse on purpose.
    - pecheny 1mo ago
      Not sarcasm at all. I think you might overestimate the time and effort needed for this. When you maintain a _personal_ fork with no users except yourself, you only ever need to change something when you encounter a bug or need a new feature. E.g. I have personal forks of mosh and cmux, each took maybe 1 hour of my time total? I found this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 resonating with me, except I obviously don't do stuff like "nightly cron to sync with main", I just never touch the code unless it breaks or I want a new feature.
      - lawrencechen 1mo ago
        Very curious about your cmux fork, any chance you could link the repo? (Maker of cmux here :))
        pecheny 1mo ago
        Oh wow :) thank you for cmux, it's a great project! The code is here: https://code.pecheny.me/pecheny/cmux https://code.pecheny.me/pecheny/cmux or if you prefer github, https://github.com/alexander-pecheny/cmux https://github.com/alexander-pecheny/cmux I think I only added two features, pasting images over mosh (ssh already worked but not mosh) and a compact version of sidebar. The story behind the fork is: I had a bug with raycast, filed a PR that fixed it for me https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/2435 https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/2435, a different fix made it into next release that for me didn't work. Maybe the problem was on my side, but at this point it was easier to fork the working version than debug further.
an0malous 1mo ago
It’s literally the VC playbook, the whole point of the funding is to undermine competitors with subsidized/free products and then raise prices/enshittify. Anyone who thinks it’ll be different this time is fooling themselves.
scubbo 1mo ago
> I am a big YC fan in general Genuine question - why?
tomhow 1mo ago
> YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification It doesn't have to be that way. YC partners are supportive if you just want to take the YC funding and nothing more, keeping the team small and just focusing on making the product better for customers. Indeed YC advises against taking VC if you don't need it.
- abirch 1mo ago
  Yes there are companies such as Streak. It's possible to pay back early funders so it's a win-win.
Fervicus 1mo ago
> Here's hoping this one's different... It won't be.

EGreg 1mo ago

Wow, congrats! Can you discuss how you got YCombinator to select your open source project? I know they sometimes fund open source… I’ve been building several large platforms since 2011 but I have never considered applying like that. Would something like this qualify: https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Qbix https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud

rrr_oh_man 1mo ago
the secret sauce is traction

humblepie 1mo ago

Okay, back to tmux it is then.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
lrvick 1mo ago
I am going to be PRing herdr to stagex as it is my daily driver. This will give it a totally independent release process with multiple parties bootstrapping, reproducing, and signing deterministic binaries for it alongside our tmux releases. We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu. As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release. Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better. My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.
dgunay 1mo ago
Over the last year I ended up duct taping a lot of functionality onto tmux to get what these new age multiplexers set out to do (session launch, live agent status, etc). And it works, but it definitely feels like duct tape. I'm not sure the tmux project wants to evolve to support this natively so for now herdr seems like one of the best open and forkable options available. Considering how little I've had to really touch my tmux setup after getting it going I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world if the FOSS community maintains a deshittified fork of herdr, should it come to that.
- natsucks 1mo ago
  I've been wondering what the point of a lot of these new multiplexer projects are when tmux is so extensible. I'd be curious to see eactly what you've done. Care to share a tmux config?

ValentineC 1mo ago

> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem. I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.

yoyohello13 1mo ago
FUD, can’t take investment when your project actually enforces user freedom.
rajangdavis 1mo ago
Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code
- spudlyo 1mo ago
  Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.
  - rajangdavis 1mo ago
    I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money. I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation. I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.
    - spudlyo 1mo ago
      In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.

dominotw 1mo ago

wtf is "runtime"

albertgoeswoof 1mo ago
What does stays open mean
- fwip 1mo ago
  It means the headline was vomited out by an LLM.
  - inigyou 1mo ago
    It's a tool for managing 20 LLM agents at the same time isn't it? They know their audience loves this slop.

rvz 1mo ago

Quick question: Would you have actually donated to Herdr if they were asking for donations? I don't think any of you would have, unless stated otherwise. So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0. You have to pay and support the tools you use or else the VCs will do it for you so you can't complain when scenarios like this keep happening.

applfanboysbgon 1mo ago
Yep. It's funny how much open source maximalists harm their own cause. Everything must be "free", ergo everything must be VC or big tech backed because free doesn't put bread on the table, so in the end devs just put more power in the hands of corporations and less power in the hands of themselves and other independent devs/small businesses, and then have the gall to complain when everything gets enshittified.
hx8 1mo ago
I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. Starting an open source project and using it to attract VC funding is one path.
- rvz 1mo ago
  > I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. This software was "free" (as in libre) and costed $0 and until now, it was licensed under AGPL 3. But contrary to one common misbelief in open source and free software, the maintenance is not free at all. > The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. In the case of this project which took off, why would you expect the maintainer to work on the project for free?

hx8 1mo ago

I switched from tmux to Herdr about six weeks ago. It's a great bit of software, the UI is focused on switching between multiple agents quickly. I run Herdr to keep my opencode instances well managed, and it also works great for having a few terminals opens next to your agent. I find myself keeping opencode sessions open for longer like what happens with Codex and Claude code, which is great if I need to revisit a context to do some follow up work. I'm genuinely excited to see if the creators can bring even more value to the application. If you're worried about enshittification I wouldn't be. It's relatively basic open source software that runs locally. A perfect candidate for a fork if the base app starts degrading.

apt-apt-apt-apt 1mo ago
Honestly, how are you guys running multiple agents, presumably with them all writing code? I find myself to be a huge bottleneck, having to do technical design and design reviews, to make sure they're actually working on the right things. I feel like there's not enough coding work to justify multiple agents, that part doesn't take long, and then it's back to design again.
- frumiousirc 1mo ago
  > I find myself to be a huge bottleneck, having to do technical design and design reviews, to make sure they're actually working on the right things. I find this depends on the LLMs being used and the person using them and the problems being solved. Like, Fable can be sent off to do some big thing for a long while and I find myself getting bored and move over to push on some other thing. Or, while reading a paper I have a string of follow up questions and ideas and launch them via web or CLI agent. Or I bounce between multiple chores in different packages, each of which is fast for an LLM and a low cognitive burden for me. Then other times, something needs my full, ongoing and serial attention where the LLM turn is only a minor element. I'll use the brief LLM interludes to get up, walk around a bit, stretch and think. As for Herdr, it seems nice when I tried it a few weeks ago. But, I'm surprised it is getting so much attention (kudos). Like many people, I've developed more than one work-alike before Herdr hit the scene. They were based on tmux which I have concluded I simply detest. In the end, I made a little agent hook script that speaks to Kitty terminal and that plus Kitty and a stable SSH persistent connection gives 80% of what I was looking for. I do still like the "control panel" aspect of my past and herdr's tries. Adding that would get me another 10%.

asadm 1mo ago

I am guessing this now directly competes with mitchellh's multiplexer / Superlogical.

SJMG 1mo ago
I just wouldn't bet against Mitchell. He doesn't need the money. He does it for the love of it.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- trymas 1mo ago
  Though what I genuinely don't understand is, why then Mitchel needs funding? If he needs funding - why accept it from weird contraversial figures? He has the freedom of choice, like no other.
  - nlitened 1mo ago
    What are some examples of uncontroversial figures who would be willing to offer funding, in your opinion?
    - trymas 1mo ago
      Why not Mitchel himself? Without anyone else. Seeding superlogical wouldn’t make a dent to his “10 digit bank account”. Probably not much more expensive than airplane hobby.
  - rpunkfu 1mo ago
    Reach
  - jeffyaw 1mo ago
    why even take funding at all?

barapa 1mo ago

[flagged]

kar1181 1mo ago

Oh man - herdr is great. This will not be net good. Sigh.

tyleo 1mo ago

Tbh it doesn’t bother me entirely. I love this tool so much I’d pay for it. VC funding can enshitify things but it can also improve them. Here’s hoping for the latter.

user- 1mo ago

Congrats to Can! I am using Herdr and i think its a great tool. A modern solo dev success story , very inspirational. I see some negative comments here that I could understand why funding scares them when it comes to their open source tool but like.. atleast congratulate the guy.

Johnny_Bonk 1mo ago
Yeah I was using cmux but it was Mac only and now I run herdr on my wsl and tunnel in from Mac and it’s awesome that it just mirrors everything. I like it and congrats to the founder

ahmadyan 1mo ago

Congrats to Can on the pre-seed funding. genuinely wishing you all the best. The terminal multiplexer / multi-agent coding space is getting very crowded. YC alone has funded many competing startups in this space: herdr, Superset, cmux, Emdash, Orca, Bullet, Conductor (Conductor was in YC before pivoting from chat->coding). I’m probably missing a few, and that’s before counting companies outside YC such as Superlogical and Agentastic.dev (by yours truly). One thing I find particularly interesting is the role of open source in this market. A lot of these products started open source (i assume as a tactical way to gain traction and build a community). But after the early traction phase or raise funding, the incentives seem to change. Being open source by itself is not a product differentiator in this market. The features required for string positioning (orchestration, cloud, custom agents, enterprise features, hosted infrastructure, etc.) often end up either closed source or available only through the hosted product. That makes me wonder how much developers actually value OSS for this category. How much does it matter to you whether your IDE or coding environment is open source? Is OSS important because you want to inspect the code, fork it, self-host it, avoid vendor lock-in, or simply because you trust open-source developer tools more? Or, for desktop software like IDEs is open source mostly a nice-to-have rather than a requirement? So I’m curious where HN lands on this

devin 1mo ago
They will all fail unless they’re acquired, which is its own kind of failure.
conartist6 1mo ago
There exist also competitors not funded by YC, like me. I won't be on any of the lists because I'm not courting agents, I'm courting humans. For me OSS is a weapon to be wielded. By making perfect software that cannot be improved upon, and making known my ownership of it, I'm am defending "embrace extend extinguish" attacks that would otherwise be damaging to me. Those attacks rely on being able to undercut a product's position in the market with a similarly positioned product that can be just slightly better and/or cheaper.
sharts 1mo ago
Indeed and once the funding comes in with more chefs in the kitchen the startups start losing touch and focus on funneling users to a platform instead of just improving the core product.

Gooblebrai 1mo ago

I thought the A2A protocol from Google would solve this of our personal agents speaking with company agents

htrp 1mo ago
90% certain A2A is dead....

kristjansson 1mo ago

As a relatively recent herdr user, I’ll say (1) congratulations and (2) the thing that was most attractive was the seeming orthogonality of the tool. It sits apart, interfaces with subordinate programs in a few clearly delineated ways, and integrates them only as much as the user desires. Critically, “no integration just show me the terminal output of my program” is an option, and a useful one! I appreciate that discipline and respect for your user in the current tool, and hope to be a paying customer of a similarly values-aligned business you’ll build on top of it!

vehemenz 1mo ago

I've been using Herdr for a while now, but I'd like a multiplexer that's also a meta-harness that I can connect to remotely. I know others have setups that work, I just haven't quite figured it out yet.

asadm 1mo ago
i just ssh to my machine (from phone etc) and run `herdr` to resume.
threecheese 1mo ago
Moshi has an integration with Herdr; you can connect to your herdr sessions over mosh, your touches register as mouse clicks in the UI (which is minimally rendered above the shell), and there’s a shortcut bar which can issue herdr-keymapped commands. It’s not open source, and costs a few bucks, but it works well and has live Claude/Codex/etc notifications if you are willing to install a hook daemon on your hosts with homebrew. I was looking for batteries-included “code from my iPhone” after trying a bunch of self-hosted stuff, now I connect to my Macs over Tailscale and get dropped right into multiplexer sessions with rich status notifications. https://getmoshi.app/ https://getmoshi.app/
- bardsore 1mo ago
  I tried Moshi. Some things I did not like - Despite the name, using mosh is a paid feature - It was not clear what is and isn't a paid feature when using the app for the first time (after selecting which server to connect to, when you select which terminal/chat to connect to there's initially a counter that says 20/20 which decreases every time you connect) - If you pair your phone to the server for push notifications a bunch of info regarding the chat is sent to their servers to produce the push (naturally), this makes it unsuitable for me at my job at least. IMO it would be sufficient to just get a "Agent needs your attention" push. All in all, I did not find it worth it compared to using mosh or SSH in Termux. I have a colleague who loves Moshi though, for him its perfect. Among other things he likes the dictation.
durdn 1mo ago
My same line of thinking and apparently of several others, turns out herdr has a plug-in for this: https://github.com/nikok6/herdr-mirror https://github.com/nikok6/herdr-mirror which is close to what I need.

throwaway613746 1mo ago

[dead]

Waterluvian 1mo ago

I haven’t seen one of those classic Herdr/Herdly tech names in a while now.

foxtrot8672 1mo ago

could just host it on the cloud?

lonesword 1mo ago

Congratulations! I came across herdr a few weeks ago and I've been daily driving it ever since. I've tried a few other tools like Emdash and Superset but Herdr is the only one that did a decent job rendering Claude code UI and didn't randomly crash and could run on a remote server.

ernsheong 1mo ago

Ironically a lot of YC hate despite the fact that we are literally in their forum.

xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago
Like the articles, hate the influence of VC on open source. Even if it stays open it still gets ruined. See Bun for an example.
- rwz 1mo ago
  I don't see how Bun is "ruined". In fact, I personally see Bun as example of the opposite — Rust rewrite seems like a huge success across the board. I'm personally using the 1.4 canary (the rust rewrite version) and definitely plan on continuing using it in my future projects.
  - notsmarthuh 1mo ago
    [flagged]
- jeffyaw 1mo ago
  just made oam.js and released it yesterday. check er out. https://oamjs.org https://oamjs.org optimized for typescript and running js/ts mcp servers.
loveparade 1mo ago
I don't think it's about YC specifically, more about VC-driven enshittification of open source software in general.

jdorfman 1mo ago

Congrats Can. Love your product, it has become the default way to orchestrate agents in my terminal.

loveparade 1mo ago

Oh no, I was using it. What's a good replacement? Guess I'll go back to tmux.

yoyohello13 1mo ago
I’m a fan of zellij

Taek 1mo ago

This title is killing me. "The runtime stays open" is such a heavy, attention grabbing sentence, it's all I can stare at on the front page. It's the type of writing that makes me hate working with LLMs, because it's so powerful at monopolizing my attention, and makes it difficult for me to focus on any of the other words on the page (whether the front page, or the comments page).

moomoo11 1mo ago
it’s ok Claude we can see you
yoyohello13 1mo ago
You should read the Herdr front page. Is so full of AIism it hurts my head.
joegibbs 1mo ago
“The noun verbs.” is such an incredibly Claudeish sentence. The other models don’t do that stuff. I’d say it’s actually biggest tell for Claude writing.

behole 1mo ago

Congrats on momentum! Well earned. Love Herdr.

abofh 1mo ago

You've joined an accelerator, not gone public, of course you're not ready to rug pull

DonHopkins 1mo ago

If they just stayed opn they could reinvest the penultimate e in calling themselves Herder.

phrmendes 1mo ago

Thanks god I didn't replace tmux

smagnuso 1mo ago

I thought I'd share that hydra recently added support for herdr directly. It is an agent multiplexer of its own, but can directly create herdr tabs for sessions: https://github.com/smagnuso/hydra-acp https://github.com/smagnuso/hydra-acp

tmzt 1mo ago

A nice little asciinema demo would be helpful on the TUI page. I should be able to see what it is, how it presents the contained agents, etc. I've been evaluating a few of these (and built one into another project I was working on, almost by accident), and am mostly looking for a frontend agnostic, terminal only (not harness) which can submit instructions to agents one line at at time with rate-limiting. I was also surprised by tmux being built on shared memory when I tried to route it over a vsock to a VM. One of the annoyances with tmux is it's failure to forward environment changes to the individual tabs (such as an option when attaching), or allow for something like a ssh-agent forwarder (shouldn't be built in though).

mastazi 1mo ago
in the herdr homepage near the top there is an interactive demo that responds to your mouse clicks

krypttr 1mo ago

Can anyone tell me how is this different than tmux?

mcintyre1994 1mo ago
Mostly it’s the agents view, it’ll show the status of and let you quickly jump to all the agents you have running in any pane/tab. It also has a default config that’s much easier to use than tmux, letting you use the mouse or simpler (IMO) keyboard shortcuts Built in worktrees are nice too.
- krypttr 1mo ago
  I guess I have to download and try. It does not sound too exciting to me.
  - mcintyre1994 1mo ago
    It also might just not be much use for you, especially if you’ve been using tmux for a long time and have a set up you like.
kkapelon 1mo ago
https://herdr.dev/compare/ https://herdr.dev/compare/

porker 1mo ago

herdr users (and all the other terminal multiplexer users): what am I missing? I use cmux because I like tabbed terminals on macOS grouped by project, saves messing with our daft window management. What is it that makes herdr et al so popular with LLM users?

Oras 1mo ago
I loved using cmux for several weeks until I saw the ram usage.
- lawrencechen 1mo ago
  Totally fair, maker of cmux here. We fixed many RAM usage issues (latest version is 0.64.22), and also added an activity monitor to see how much RAM/CPU coding agents are taking. My cmux has been running with 136 workspaces and 218 terminals, and has been hovering around 5.7 GB. Granted, the theoretical RAM minimum for this number of terminals is around 1-1.5 GB before real scrollback, so we definitely have more work to do.
  - Oras 1mo ago
    Thanks, good to know. I installed the update and will check it out again. If it helps, the main reason I love cmux is how can I manage my projects into folders, I have fast access to all the projects which made my life a lot easier working in the terminal. I can also have coding, test, monitoring spilt in one tab per project.
kkapelon 1mo ago
https://herdr.dev/compare/ https://herdr.dev/compare/
- porker 1mo ago
  It answers the "What" but not the "Why?"
  - 1mo ago

khalic 1mo ago

Congrats to the herdr team! Please don't abandon the open source part of the business when the cash starts flowing... every open source project that does a bait'n'switch is a stab at the viability of open source as a whole

vrighter 1mo ago
If they take vc funding, it's only a matter of when, not if. They all say that.

gitowiec 1mo ago

What's the purpose of this project? Only to close the lid and let agent work in the background? Really that's what I found useful on project's homepage

ubercore 1mo ago
I dropped it in to replace zellij, and get better agent integration in the process.

hrishikesh-s 1mo ago

I only heard about Herdr recently and was pleasantly surprised that I had invented the same thing 6 months ago as an emacs package called Magnus :)

la_fayette 1mo ago

I started using Herdr and I really like it. Since the main features I wanted are already there, I have no issue with the commercialization. I still wonder how this can be turned into a profitable business. It'll be really interesting to follow Herdr's future. All the best to the founder!

level87 1mo ago

I've tried Herdr a couple of times, and just can't get into it. I think what's off putting is another layer of keyboard shortcuts over my terminal...I don't see what it's doing that Wezterm and a bunch of splits does anyway? I'm almost certainly missing the point.

SkyArrow 1mo ago
For me, herdr's benefits over terminal splits are: 1. Surfacing agents which are ready for further input 2. Letting you jump quickly to said agents 3. SSH session persistence, as I work on a beefy devbox at work. tmux also offers this. I often need to juggle several streams of work at $job in parallel - such are the expectations. Like you though, I'd much prefer to use my terminal directly with the indirection of an additional multiplexer like herdr or tmux - lower latency, easier scrollback & copying. Session persistence can be solved by zmx [1]. Points 1 and 2 however are concerned with tracking the state of and navigating to parallel agents. I'm thinking about creating a TUI or SwiftUI app to handle those points in the way I like, but the challenge of integrating such an app with zmx and kitty to jump to the right panes both locally and over a devbox is a little daunting. Plus, I've found my devbox doesn't play too well with `ControlMaster auto` SSH config suggested by the zmx docs. [1] https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx

DrStartup 1mo ago

that sucks, time to look for a new one

gaiagraphia 1mo ago

Spooky. Just set it up last night after ragequitting my own attempt. Good luck!

piratebroadcast 1mo ago

I have a bit of a contrarian thought here, but I tried Herdr and I didn't like it. To me, it kind of proved the opposite point it intended, in that agent orchestration actually belongs at the terminal level. I'd like to see for example a fork of Ghostty become the agent orchestration control room.

pheewma 1mo ago
They have this already. Both cmux and supacode use libghostty in the backend.