Comment by porker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by porker | Hacker News Reader

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> Why? Because it has more/better features. Or you mean something else?

I mean something else. Zoom out, why do people need, or want, a tool like herdr?

What has led people to this point? Is it because they need terminal multiplexing to spawn agents, instead of using built-in subagents? Do they like cute sheep icons? What made having multiple terminals open unappealing? Is it the built-in alerting when attention is needed? Is it only applicable to people running their agents on remote machines?

When I look at these kinds of tools, that is the question I can't answer because I suspect I haven't run into the pain points they address yet, despite running multiple LLM sessions in multiple projects simultaneously.

Strictly from personal opinion

1) Built-in sub agents assume you use a single AI agent. Some people use multiple, so they need separate terminals/processes by definition. Even if you use the same agent sometimes you have different security boundaries. Think also the needs for a consultant working with many customers at once.

2)Multiple-open terminals. When that number passes 5-7 for me, then yes I don't like clicking on each one of those manually to see where my attention is needed. Herdr (and similar tools) show exactly what is working and what stalled.

3) No I use herdr locally mostly right now. But since it is just ssh I like the fact that you can run it from anywhere. I haven't done it yet, but I imagine you could open a herdr session from a steamdeck to a remote server to debug somthing

Another thing I like on herdr is easy work trees. Sure you can do it manually with git commands, or ask the agent itself to use a new worktree, but just having workrees with a single click and a visual tree/children hierarchy was the killer feature for making me look at herdr at the first place.

Yes technically you can do the same thing with just many terminals and custom scripts. But it is the same question of why Dropbox sells when you could do the same thing with cvs/ftp :-)

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