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Comment by jacobgold | Hacker News Reader

And you're probably more productive than the people using Pi. Although you'd be even better off using a GUI agent multiplexer of some kind rather than juggling terminal tabs.

I love open source. I love the terminal. I spent the last 20+ years in a terminal w/vim every single day, and then claude/codex TUIs, and yet I care more about my own productivity so I don't use any of that now.

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There's something about this take that... irks me. A little bit more every time I hear it, and I've been hearing it a lot. I dislike the implication that anyone who takes more care with their setup than downloading an exe from a website and double clicking it is some kind of chump. They could be prompting the next ticket instead!

Even if taking pride in your tools was a productivity killer (I have my doubts), maybe there's mental value to be gained.

You're inferring things I did not actually imply.

In Oct 2026, if you're optimizing for productivity, then yes, you probably should just use both Claude and Codex in a GUI agent multiplexer and forget about everything else.

If you care about other things, then have fun, no one is stopping you. I'd disagree with you that using alternatives mean you take more "care" and have more "pride" in your tools, but it's hardly worth arguing over.

What do you suggest for a GUI agent multiplexer?

t3.codes

cursor.com

conductor.build

code.visualstudio.com w/ Claude Plugin or equivalent plugin

zed.dev

there are dozens tbh

thats not a suggestion.

none of these are multiplexers

Not sure what "multiplexer" means in this context but Zed allows to switch between agents thread with a side panel and that works very well

I like Orca

onorca.dev. I used herdr before now Orca has fully replaced it. (I'm not affilianted with Orca in any way except I use it every day). Orca also supports separate hosts. My setup Orca running in my Mac. Orca running in my home proxmox lxc (orcabox). I have few different projects, Rails, PHP, etc. In Orca, I open these projects and point it to my local folder as well as the folder remotely.

I usually start a codex or claude session on the remote host, close my mac, even restart Orca desktop on mac, but when I start Orca, I can watch the Orca on my remote host working through.

It's similar to Claude remote session, but just easier to manage, easier to create worktree, easier to navigate, open multiple tabs etc.

you can just roll your own, this is probably the most popular side project of the past year, I crafted my own version within a day or so this past week, with corny visual assets as well since its just for me. Kinda rolled my workflows into it so it fits how i work with plans and how i avoid compaction in favor of handoffs or just plan docs that constrain each session to x amount of tokens each session.

Tossed all my weekly usage for each provider at the top with their 5hour windows and such. its been great so far.

Yeah I also created my own TUI one and only took a couple days. Using it less now though because the models have gotten pretty good at spinning up their own agents.

The important thing is just to a GUI agent multiplexer, they're all mostly doing the same kind of thing. IMHO it's very important to have the official claude and codex harnesses (not just models). I also like having each session in a isolated container (or VM) so the agent can go wild and run in yolo mode.

I usually recommend Conductor to most people. Personally, I use the one I built, but it's got a few ergonomic issues for most people which I still need to fix.

zed.dev is like Orca, but lightning fast and fully multi-player (both AI and humans)

Paseo allows you to start a daemon from command line, thereby passing your ENV credentials to the daemon from, say, your 1Password-based env. Then both local Mac GUI and their native iPhone app (through Tailscale) can connect to this daemon. This is the most ergonomic local and remote setup where I can start a session on my Mac and continue on my phone or vice versa, with any agent: Pi, Claude, Codex, OMP, all natively supported.

No affiliation, just arrived at Paseo after a bunch of research.

It's not an either/or. Orca is a GUI agent multiplexer that works with dozens of harnesses, including Pi. The advantage with Pi is that you can vibe code any kind of extension you want. I like to see various stats (tps, ttft, etc) on each turn, and there's an extension for that, but it doesn't show wall clock time for the turn. Ok, pull down the extension and tweak it to add that. It's great.

If you like the terminal I'm building https://alcubi.ai/delegator/ It's terminal based and I've taken a different approach to avoid context overload of switching tabs. Agents run in the background and you review the work when it's ready.

vim/past vim terminal dweller here.

I've eventually settled on a CLI agent multiplexer that essentially run in the background while the frontend is a GUI gateway agent to that backend system with a goal middle layer so I no longer need to interject directly into the prompts and forces the CC and Codexes to communicate to me in a structured format relevant to my purpose.

What do you use

Personally I use gh copilot in vscode and make new worktrees when I want parallel agents that are both going to write code.

For research, planning, figuring out bugs, etc I usually don’t bother creating the worktree until I’ve decided on the implementation.

I’m sure there’s better workflows and software, but all I’ve got for work is gh copilot and Claude enterprise. I like copilot better than Claude for the most part.

I was under the impression that GitHub Copilot was much more expensive because you're always paying API rates?

it's expensive as hell

Enterprise pays API rates everywhere afaik. Our Claude Enterprise is pay per token too. Maybe some volume deal idk.

what advantage do you have with a gui multiplexer over the terminal?

You can burn a lot more tokens very quickly for the illusion of increased productivity ;-)

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