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Comment by dregitsky | Hacker News Reader

These tools all assume you have machines to run the agents on. But for parallel agents I'm pretty convinced you want each agent on its own isolated devbox running your dev environment (not e.g. worktrees on one box) - which isn't trivial to set up and manage.

I'm working this with https://boxes.dev - a workspace for launching and managing claude + codex sessions, each running in its own cloud devbox.

We launched with a desktop app but have gotten a lot of pull for terminal-driven workflows, so have a TUI as well. It's interesting - when the Codex desktop app launched I was so sure that GUI is the future for coding agents (it's just a chat!). But turns out there's no killing the CLI

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Running on a Cloudbox has its own set of problems. Some projects need desktop GUI tools (particularly desktop apps themselves, but some may also want these for profilers / debuggers etc). Some projects need USB. Even if you don't need any of those, you need to figure out what to do about build caches, package manager environments, credentials / secrets, VPN config, shell customizations, and those are just a few things that come to mind.

I do like having a permanent, remote workbox, but am a lot less keen on the idea of ephemeral boxes unless you're a company willing to invest into that infra.

Also the reason why https://exe.dev exists.

no affiliation, just want to say exe.dev is amazing! They got all the primitives right and it’s changed the way I approach starting new projects.

I stopped running Claude on the terminal and use only the desktop app now. It had lots of advantages in my opinion. The terminal is really limited unfortunately, don’t know why so many devs still stick to it, and I used it for 30 years.

Interesting, which OS are you using?

If linux, can you name 1-2 advantages the desktop has over the terminal?

I'm using Hermes but these should apply to any agent that has both TUI and GUI versions. The GUI version will have:

- drag and drop

- show document type, icon and filename

- inline images

- variable fonts, esp. monospace for code blocks

So GUI is mainly about readability. CLI works fine too but is inherently limited. I think GUI agents will keep pushing further in information layout, rendering, retrieval and interactivity. We're just at the beginning of it.

Even more basic stuff like copy and paste, which works like everywhere else except the terminal. Can you paste something in the middle of what you already typed in your terminal? Not in mine. It can highlight the stuff as you type it , though some terminals can also do that somewhat. It has a list of my sessions so I don’t need to have lots of terminals open or juggle them with tmux and stuff like that. I can actually click on a command to see its output and expand individually thinking sections and so on. I can review code on a side bar instead of losing the text box I am writing on. There’s probably hundreds of more advantages you must really make an effort to not see.

The only advantage of the terminal is that it’s easier to use on remote machines. I can’t think of anything else, even the usual benefits of composing commands is not relevant for a CLI like Claude Code.

my main reason: i cannot run agents persistently on a remote host with a desktop app.

>for parallel agents I'm pretty convinced you want each agent on its own isolated devbox running your dev environment (not e.g. worktrees on one box)

Why?

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