One Terminal for Every AI Agent: Herdr Hits 8K Stars

Open-source Herdr launched earlier this year with a precise pitch — a terminal multiplexer that knows which AI coding agent is doing what, in real time. In under a month the Rust-built project pulled in 8,300 GitHub stars, a signal that the problem it solves has been waiting for a solution.

The core mechanic: Herdr gives each AI agent its own pane inside a single window, and tracks its state live — blocked, working, done, or idle. That sounds minor until you're juggling Claude Code, Codex and Cursor on the same project and constantly alt-tabbing to figure out who's stuck. Herdr ships with native support for 17 agents: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok CLI, Hermes Agent, Devin CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Kimi Code CLI, Amp, and more. It runs as a single Rust binary with no external dependencies, opens inside any existing terminal, and restores sessions after a disconnect. Installation is a one-liner or a Homebrew install.

Why this is different from tmux

Tmux is good at splitting screens and persisting shells. It knows nothing about what's running inside them. Herdr adds a layer of agent awareness on top: the UI reflects the live state of each process, so you can tell at a glance which agent needs attention, which has finished, and which is sitting idle waiting for input. Workspaces and tabs let you group agents by project or task. A Socket API lets you query or steer any agent from an external script, which opens the door to lightweight orchestration without installing a heavier framework.

The project uses an AGPL-3.0 license — free for individuals and open-source projects, with a commercial license available for teams that can't ship AGPL code. A Windows preview beta is also available, making it one of the few terminal agent managers that covers all three major platforms.

The timing fits a real shift in how developers use AI assistants. A year ago, most people ran one AI session at a time. Now it's common to split work between a background Codex agent handling a refactor, a Claude Code session for architecture questions, and a third agent writing tests — all running simultaneously. The tooling for managing that parallel workload has lagged badly behind the agents themselves. Herdr is the first widely adopted attempt to close that gap in a pure terminal environment, which matters because the heaviest AI work still happens over SSH, in containers, or on remote machines where no GUI is available.