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.
> I find myself to be a huge bottleneck, having to do technical design and design reviews, to make sure they're actually working on the right things.
I find this depends on the LLMs being used and the person using them and the problems being solved.
Like, Fable can be sent off to do some big thing for a long while and I find myself getting bored and move over to push on some other thing. Or, while reading a paper I have a string of follow up questions and ideas and launch them via web or CLI agent. Or I bounce between multiple chores in different packages, each of which is fast for an LLM and a low cognitive burden for me. Then other times, something needs my full, ongoing and serial attention where the LLM turn is only a minor element. I'll use the brief LLM interludes to get up, walk around a bit, stretch and think.
As for Herdr, it seems nice when I tried it a few weeks ago. But, I'm surprised it is getting so much attention (kudos). Like many people, I've developed more than one work-alike before Herdr hit the scene. They were based on tmux which I have concluded I simply detest. In the end, I made a little agent hook script that speaks to Kitty terminal and that plus Kitty and a stable SSH persistent connection gives 80% of what I was looking for. I do still like the "control panel" aspect of my past and herdr's tries. Adding that would get me another 10%.
What made you prefer it to tmux? Looking at their demo, they put a lot of emphasis on the workspace like feature which tmux already got with sessions. Not sure what is the point of all those new tui runtime, tried a few but always got back to tmux, what am I missing?
What you’re missing is the status updates. Herdr applies pattern recognition to detect the status of an agent running inside, so you get updates on all your agent threads at a glance.
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.