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.
If you're truly multi-tasking with this type of setup it feels more like "tiktok coding", "brainrot coding", or any other term that should be used for it.
I'm pretty sure we're moving away from it, the agent you interact with via voice or typing will go to a higher and higher abstraction level, and you won't have to effectively micro-manage them.
What are you using for the environment part? Containers?
setup.sh figures out which ports are available and changes .env files accordingly. Run.sh runs the actual setup.
For me the main advantage of herdr is that when I have the codex integration activated, herdr will keep track of the codex session ids and automatically restore them after restart
With the other multiplexers I had to create a separate tool that would save/restore layout/tabs/panes/session ids. And I had to run it manually. With herdr it just works, almost out of the box
Oh, it’s also very nice that you can create groups of tabs, so it’s easier to organize if you have more than 3-4 terminal sessions open (I usually keep at least 3 tabs, each split into an agent pane and a zsh pane)
And lastly, mouse scroll support is a lot better. I’ve had many issues with scrolling codex’s output. tmux and zellij’s scrolling wouldn’t play nicely with codex’s output, but herdr seems to work very well
I then make it show icons and indicators for blockers, ready sessions that need attention, TODO lists that include notifications and actions (because it's so easy to miss things while working on/with many sessions). Shows costs (loop coordinator and non-LC costs, by day, etc) so I can optimize costs.
It's fun, a learning experience and it's more productive. With excellent SOTA and coding agents now, we should be building tools to improve our work even more than before. Try it.
I should probably download different types of frog sounds for different agents though.
- I don't need to use TMUX's wonky keyboard shortcuts
- I moved off of TMUX anyway, when ssh-ing into remote servers became 'not a thing'
- automatic coding session management, like auto resume, layout manamgement, etc. out of the box, without setting up TMUX, which could be a wormhole for some, by the time you fix mouse scrolling, cut/paste, etc...
I'm currently using CMUX, and been pretty happy with it it at this time, but loving the evolution of all these tools
If you're making valuable tools, anthropic, openai, or one of the other big players in the space will hire you/buy you out and then they will release the tool themselves.
I'm getting really tired of everyone doing their own special rain dances and then acting like they made it rain.