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Discussion (35 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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
https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr
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.
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. :)
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.
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
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.
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.