Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

ccollinmanderson about 3 hours ago 54 commentsRead Article on herdr.dev

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84% Positive

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Discussion (54 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ahmadyan•25 minutes 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

kristjansson•4 minutes 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!

ValentineC•about 2 hours 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.

tyre•about 2 hours ago

The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.

If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.

Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.

guywithahat•about 2 hours ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

They're right, but they're presenting it in a way as if the toxicity of AGPL is the actual truth, and not just the opinion of greedy corporations.

Being toxic to greedy corporations but beneficial to everyone else is the point of the GPL licenses.

toomuchtodo•about 1 hour ago

Seems like the path is to use LLMs to launder code from VC funded efforts and their public codebases into codebases with a copyleft license. Otherwise you have to wait for the rug pull before taking action (Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao). It is fair use to train and create derivative works after all, as courts have ruled so far.

rajangdavis•about 2 hours ago

Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code

spudlyo•about 2 hours ago

Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.

rajangdavis•about 2 hours 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.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

Greedy corporations, such as those founded by Y Combinator, want to take without giving.

gilthelander•about 1 hour ago

That's a bold accusation. Can you cite actual examples of this alleged malfeasance?

Do YC CEO's dress in all white like Boss Hogg?

Barrin92•13 minutes ago

>Do YC CEO's dress in all white like Boss Hogg?

No, of course not, they're your friends. They even have a ping pong table and a smoothie bar. It's like in the Soviet Union, everyone's a comrade, nobody's a boss

https://youtu.be/fQlJE7ABNu4

gilthelander•about 1 hour ago

Any potential customers that matter have already been advised by their lawyers to not touch AGPL with a 10 meter pole. This includes Google:

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

This extends way beyond the superficial toxic license stuff. There is a lot of legal ambiguity around copyleft licenses and most companies just don't want to deal with it unless it's absolutely unavoidable.

koiueo•about 2 hours ago

No money from investors

user-•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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

asadm•about 2 hours ago

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

SJMG•6 minutes ago

[delayed]

humblepie•about 2 hours ago

Okay, back to tmux it is then.

dgunay•40 minutes 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.

lrvick•about 2 hours 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.

hx8•about 2 hours 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.

kar1181•about 2 hours ago

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

nlh•about 2 hours 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.)

Fervicus•24 minutes ago

> Here's hoping this one's different...

It won't be.

scubbo•about 1 hour ago

> I am a big YC fan in general

Genuine question - why?

an0malous•about 2 hours 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.

tomhow•35 minutes 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•14 minutes ago

Yes there are companies such as Streak. It's possible to pay back early funders so it's a win-win.

tamimio•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)

sarky-litso•about 2 hours 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

dominotw•about 2 hours ago

wtf is "runtime"

albertgoeswoof•about 2 hours ago

What does stays open mean

fwip•about 2 hours ago

It means the headline was vomited out by an LLM.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

It's a tool for managing 20 LLM agents at the same time isn't it? They know their audience loves this slop.

tyleo•about 2 hours 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.

EGreg•about 2 hours 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/Intercoin

https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud

rvz•about 2 hours 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.

hx8•about 2 hours 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.

LikeAnElephant•21 minutes ago

When I moved to herdr I specifically looked for a donate / purchase button on their website and it wasn't anywhere to be found (at least in a prominent location).

I gladly donate / pay subscriptions to software I use regularly... but the company has a responsibility to make it obvious on how to do so

rovr138•about 1 hour ago

I actually donate to a bunch of tools I use.

bigyabai•about 2 hours ago

Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? This status quo is fine.

applfanboysbgon•about 2 hours 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.