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Comment by Daviey | Hacker News Reader

I find TUI scales better for multiple concurrent agents across the same and different codebases, especially using tools such as herdr. I can fire off an agent, which runs sub-agents. Then check-in periodically to re-steer as needed or be interrupt driven for completions of tasks. I can't see how vscode/GUI is better for this?

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For me the tight integration with Claude Artifacts (and whatever OpenAIs copy of those is) is super value-able for me. The biggest bottleneck for me is gathering all my thoughts and analyzing what needs to be done.

I was a long term user of the TUI and tools like cmux / herdr but now I find it much easier to actually focus

Check out https://open-artifacts.com - it gives you that and much more. It also allows your agent sessions to talk to each other regardless of which machine they’re running on. It’s free and OSS. I’m the creator - happy to answer questions.

Very nice!!! I actually built something much more primitive as my workflow too. I'll definitely send the robots to learn from you and what you did!

(Edited after research: I picked up your ideas of search and versioning. Very nice! Thank you!)

I’ll send this to the team at my company. No one likes feeling vendor locked in on artifacts but they are great at being like “hey I had an agent cook on this topic over night, here are the results, and what we need to make a decision on”.

Just some feedback for corporate use - it’s not clear to me from the landing page if it’s really intended for internal company use and if it’s hard tied to CloudFlare. I.e. if there was a “here’s how you can deploy it on AWS in 2 minutes” option I would just toss it on our dev env and show people a POC.

With open source projects we’re increasingly worried about supply chain type risks - it would be good if there was some boilerplate on “this is how you know this can be deployed internally and have zero risk of phoning home etc”

Hey, great feedback. I'm currently re-doing the landing page as the project has expanded quite a bit (including native annotations/comments, presence, inter-instance collaboration/sharing, Yjs based real-time collaboration for agents and humans, etc).

Currently this works using Cloudflare Workers (and Durable Objects). This provides your agents with trivial tools to make realtime multi-player artifacts. Some demos include (all made by DeepSeek v4.1 Flash in ~5-10m each:

- Real-time tic-ta-toe: https://demo.open-artifacts.com/a/kA5P1UTCZ9jwRSAx - Chess: https://demo.open-artifacts.com/a/ErF1KapC2paDnmgs - Mini version of r/place (pixel canvas): https://demo.open-artifacts.com/a/xsDmeifD7bX7NeSJ - Live poll: https://demo.open-artifacts.com/a/PY6AbssBQg4epqgk

The full list of demos is here: https://demo.open-artifacts.com/

I'll be opening sign-ups for a hosted version in the coming days. All feedback welcome. Actively trying to make it better.

interesting

seems like they "gadgets" concept of Cloudflare OS [1] but decoupled front Cloudflare OS chat interface.

It even runs on Durable Object like CFOS

1. https://os.cloudflare.app/

Exactly. It is based on Cloudflare primitives to give real-time/multiplayer capabilities to artifacts. It also comes with a bus (originally made it as a separate project https://open-bus.ai, but made it all into one project).

The problem I'm trying to solve for myself is: I want to have a single place where me and my collaborators (my agents, other humans and _their_ agents) can all come together and do work efficiently. It's like a Google Docs/Drive but for the AI era and not tied to any one AI lab.

Same... I use herdr to manage 12+ sessions easily. There's no GUI that can do that.

Herdr looks similar to the Jetbrains Air stuff they just added to their IDEs. You can have GUI sessions in tabs, label them, tag them, stick them in folders, archive them, put them next to the code that's being changed, etc.

Cc desktop supports folders, named tabs, archived sessions, subagents with two way comms between them and their spawner.

You cannot put them next to code being changed but the code viewers are contextual to the session.

I am struggling to see a major difference let alone major advantage of herdr

Does CC desktop support non-Claude models? That could be a big one. Herdr works pretty seemlessly with any model provider and different harnesses, like Pi.

I am using paseo.sh, with 12+ sessions across pi/codex/agy on 3 dev machines.

This seems to be the new meta for a segment of the HN crowd, and I'm struggling to understand how it works. I'm at most having 4 sessions parallely, and even then I am burned out after a full day of this. How can you keep up with what all the agents are doing?

From the people around me doing this - they aren't keeping up, they aren't looking at the finished project/product, then throwing it over the wall for others to triage. Rinse and repeat. Definitely fits some people's personalities, but not mine.

no way anyone has 12 "projects" that are even worth working on. No one at any company is working on 12 things at the same time.

I guarantee they're just starting a bunch of half baked random projects, abandoning them half way through and starting 12 new ones.

They're probably calling things projects that most of us would call tasks or minor features.

It's less 12 projects and more 1 project + 11 changes/experiments. Complex projects still get the most attention, but I do a lot more work which may end up being discarded, and agents pick up any tasks which would've otherwise landed in the backlog. Update dependencies here, rebase this branch, start working on this issue, change this and benchmark it, etc.

I mean... I do. And yes they're all worth working on.

I think the point was why working on simultaneously, aside from inability to prioritize.

I guess the main benefit of herdr is it essentially flags the state of agents and what needs attention. So you can have multiple ones running and quickly go to the ones that need an input.

I think there _is_ a way to do this nicely in a GUI btw, which I've been toying with as a side project. Basically... build it as a trello style board.

And it's not 12 projects, its multiple tasks, e.g. 'look at this crash for me', 'fix this extension in my pi env that is doing something bad', 'debug this high memory usage', etc. etc. It's easy to just fire tasks off and come back to them later. The project ones usually require more human focus ofc.

Now if only I could automate meetings like this.

> I think there _is_ a way to do this nicely in a GUI btw, which I've been toying with as a side project. Basically... build it as a trello style board

Something like Orca's Agent Dashboard, or something else? https://www.onorca.dev/docs/model/agents-sessions

It took me like 500k tokens to vibe a similar kanban board for OpenCode desktop (I took orca and herdr as references). It is a v2 plugin and I love it. It does what I need across all my projects, I tweak it the way I need, and it's much more convenient than the native tab panel.

Link?

I've found an agent to manage agents, plus aggressively creating skills/workflows helps.

The main agent is the entry point:

"review this PR" should open a new workspace and spin up one or more agents to do whatever review workflow you like.

"Implement ticket xyz" should open a new space, read the ticket content, plan/write/test/review/create a PR without much managerial input. You'll still need to answer questions and check work between steps, but all of the busy work can be done by your agent(s) with skills. If they get it wrong, update the skill.

Same for "research this bug report/product question/error trace".

I’m not sure I understand. I use codex as is with 12+ sessions, there’s no issue at all and my coworkers scale it far beyond that.

what? herdr and gui interface for this look very similar aside from being able to have 12 windows open at the same time in herdr but i don't want that?

have you used the GUIs recently? because this is literally what they are best for.

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