A terminal for each AI agent — Herdr reaches 8k stars!

Herdr was released earlier this year with a clear value proposition: a multiplexer that understands the status of your AI code agents in realtime. Understandably, it quickly gained traction with 8,300 Github stars within less than a month. This shows there’s a need for such a tool.

At the heart of Herdr is the ability to display each agent in a separate pane within a single window while displaying their realtime status (stuck, busy, completed, idle). This may seem trivial but imagine having to use Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor on the same project and frequently switching between them to see if someone is stuck. With Herdr, you get out-of-the-box support for 17 AI code agents including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok CLI, Hermes Agent, Devin CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Kimi Code CLI, Amp, etc. It’s written in a single Rust binary without any dependencies and works on any existing terminal. It also persists sessions upon disconnection. You can install it with a simple command or via Homebrew.

1Why this is different from tmux

While tools like Tmux are great for screen splitting and session persistence, they don’t care about the processes inside the terminals. Herdr introduces an additional level of agent awareness by displaying the realtime status of each process. This way, you can easily identify which agent is stuck, which one is completed, and which one is idle and waiting for input. You can organize your agents into workspaces/tabs based on projects/tasks. Also, you can use the Socket API to interact/control any agent from an external script allowing you to build simple orchestration flows without needing to install a full-blown framework.

Herdr is licensed under AGPL-3.0 (free for personal use/OSS) but also offers a commercial license for those who cannot use AGPL code. There’s even a Windows Preview Beta so it’s one of the rare terminal agent managers that supports all 3 main OSes.

Herdr comes at the right time when we see a growing trend of using multiple AI code agents concurrently. Last year, most of us were using just one AI code agent at a time. Today, many of us have multiple agents working side by side e.g. a Codex agent refactoring code, a Claude Code agent helping with architecture decisions, and another agent writing tests all at once. However, there hasn’t been much innovation in terms of tools to manage these concurrent tasks. Herdr is the first popular tool that tries to address this issue in a pure terminal experience. This is important since most intensive AI code usage occurs through SSH, containers, or remote servers without a GUI.