Congrats to Can on the pre-seed funding. genuinely wishing you all the best.
The terminal multiplexer / multi-agent coding space is getting very crowded. YC alone has funded many competing startups in this space: herdr, Superset, cmux, Emdash, Orca, Bullet, Conductor (Conductor was in YC before pivoting from chat->coding). I’m probably missing a few, and that’s before counting companies outside YC such as Superlogical and Agentastic.dev (by yours truly).
One thing I find particularly interesting is the role of open source in this market.
A lot of these products started open source (i assume as a tactical way to gain traction and build a community). But after the early traction phase or raise funding, the incentives seem to change.
Being open source by itself is not a product differentiator in this market. The features required for string positioning (orchestration, cloud, custom agents, enterprise features, hosted infrastructure, etc.) often end up either closed source or available only through the hosted product.
That makes me wonder how much developers actually value OSS for this category. How much does it matter to you whether your IDE or coding environment is open source?
Is OSS important because you want to inspect the code, fork it, self-host it, avoid vendor lock-in, or simply because you trust open-source developer tools more? Or, for desktop software like IDEs is open source mostly a nice-to-have rather than a requirement? So I’m curious where HN lands on this
It's super important to me. I use Herdr every day and I maintain a whole stack of changes. From minor comfort tweaks that are just preference, to several larger changes like add jj workspace support and a WIP web based view (powered by xterm.js).
This is not the only project like this too. Many of my devtools are piling up changes. I try to upstream changes where it makes sense, but many times they are either very bespoke, or I can't be bothered to do them "right" (for example for the jj workspace change, I just ripped out git support, so I didn't have to futz with syncing the symantics up between the two and config and whatnot).
LLMs have made making personal changes to devtools so effortless that I am now extremely hesitant to use any non source available software at all.
I have been thinking about a possibly expanded market for source available software. I don't really care what the license of the software is, I'm not sharing it at all or using it commercially, so it's kinda a moot point. If someone made some amazing software and sold the source I'd definitely consider it. I know there are all sorts of practical business problems with that, but that aside I'm curious if others feel the same?
It's not anywhere near making PR ready (and never will be) but here is the branch [1]. I make no promises on it's functionality, and I only periodically rebase Herdr's latest over it. I have been using the jj change for awhile though with no issues. So YMMV.
You can also see the combined output of all my changes at [2], which Jujutsu makes so damn easy via megamerges.
i see your point, in that light what herdr is doing here make sense. keep some part open (e.g. runtime or whatever that means, or the front-end, or the user-facing logic, etc) and move the business-logic/etc to proprietary. So you get to customize the software to meet your needs, and at the same time to create some revenue incentive to grow the company.
alternative is to collect/sell usage data, which is icky, or provide something as a service (token usage, infra, plugins, etc)
Ya, I'm not sure even that would be enough though to be honest.
I am kinda imagining a structure for a theoretical dev tooling business that might be OSS Core, and Source Available additional features. I'm not sure if there is a generally accepted definition of Source Available, but I don't necessarily mean that the source is just out in public on the web. It could be sent to you when you purchase the product, and could maybe even be sold on an upgrade sort of model, where you pay again for the next "big version" of the software, like the good old days of desktop software.
I’m the founder of scape.work - and it’s precisely why we’re not free, not open source. I want to build something with a mission of helping people own their infrastructure around AI tooling locally. If I raise money I am legally bound to my shareholders to create value, as opposed to my customers and my mission. Bootstrapping has never made more sense, when code is so cheap.
Indeed and once the funding comes in with more chefs in the kitchen the startups start losing touch and focus on funneling users to a platform instead of just improving the core product.
There exist also competitors not funded by YC, like me. I won't be on any of the lists because I'm not courting agents, I'm courting humans.
For me OSS is a weapon to be wielded. By making perfect software that cannot be improved upon, and making known my ownership of it, I'm am defending "embrace extend extinguish" attacks that would otherwise be damaging to me. Those attacks rely on being able to undercut a product's position in the market with a similarly positioned product that can be just slightly better and/or cheaper.
frankly with the level of complexity of IDEs, I just need a working product. In my mind it is closer to "photoshop" now than vim. I would probably pay for VSCode. I can't believe its free.
In practice, I suspect the entire category will be folded into Claude Code and Codex (Anthropic is already trying with Claude Agents), and that will do 80% of the job at 0% of the cost and configuration effort.
External programs will still be useful for the tiny minority who wants different harnesses for different projects, but yeah, tiny minority.
in my experience, tools usually have a longer shelf-life than models/labs.
e.g. terminals and IDEs have been around for much longer, and people tend to stick around with their preferred IDEs for much longer (years/decades).
One bad cycle and the next Opus 6 or GPT 7 might flop (think what happend to LLama4 or Gemini), and the user quickly switch to the next best thing. So it make sense to build your tooling to be model-agnostic.
The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.
If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.
Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.
> if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it
No, it isn't; a client talking to an AGPLv3 service over a network API stays a separate program and is not touched by the license at all. Section 13 places obligations solely on whoever runs a modified version of the service, while remote users, API clients included, only gain the right to receive that service's source. So nothing on the client side must suddenly become AGPLv3, and the only thing that ever has to be shared is the AGPL'd program itself, not anything across the API boundary. The first half of your post is basically unfounded FUD; the second half tracks.
You may think this. I may think this. But what really matters is if the lawyers for your customers think this. It may be pure FUD, but AGPL projects have a tough time getting adoption in companies because they would rather avoid the problem than be wrong.
This is true, unfortunately. I've have had to walk away from a client because their software-illiterate lawyer didn't want me to build with copyleft dependencies.
It wasn't the only red flag in this case, but frustrating nonetheless.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.
You can totally make profits by selling services based on AGPL code btw, it's completely fine. As long as you redistribute your derivative work as AGPL too.
There's nothing toxic in the AGPL for you as long as you don't want to make that code proprietary (even without making profits)
No. There's no restriction of usage in the (A)GPL. Anyone, including big corps, can use AGPL software. Preventing them to use the software is not the point neither. The point is trying to ensure end user freedom.
They just choose avoid agpl software. Their loss. Unfortunately they also spread FUD on this and many commenters here happily convey it.
AGREED! Its sheer insanity to call the AGPL toxic. The license is actually quite simple if a little wordy. They should have accompanied it with a preamble that was super clear and to the point.So here it is in our 170 words for you to read, share, and use:
Copyright (c) [year] [copyright holders]
Permission is hereby granted to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files, to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies of the software, including for commercial purposes, subject to the following conditions:
If you distribute this software, or any work derived from it, you must release the complete source code under this same licence. If you modify this software and users interact with your version over a network — as a web application, an API, or a hosted service — you must offer those users the complete source code of your version, at no charge. All copies must include this copyright notice and this licence. You may not impose additional licence restrictions beyond this.
These permissions are irrevocable and royalty-free for the term of copyright. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. This is a plain-language summary. The full legal text of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, governs all use for you.
Same rights. Same freedoms only a little more opiniated delivery. Same business card. The only difference: when someone takes your code, tweakes it and builds a service on it, the tweaks, the improvements must come back.
Seems like the path is to use LLMs to launder code from VC funded efforts and their public codebases into codebases with a copyleft license. Otherwise you have to wait for the rug pull before taking action (Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao). It is fair use to train and create derivative works after all, as courts have ruled so far.
You can just take someone else's permissively licensed code and relicense it AGPL, or even proprietary if you want to. Corporations want it proprietary but the same trick works for copyleft.
For bonus points make sure your fork has better SEO than the original, so when someone who heard it's permissive embeds it in a proprietary product, you can sue them.
I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money.
I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.
I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.
In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.
If he wants to make money he needs to sell licenses, not give them away for free. To that end, making the free version AGPL is generally a good move. It ensures people can get hooked on your product and when they start working at corporations they have to pay to keep using it.
Enshitification is 100% guaranteed with any vc backing. Maybe not now, but definitely in the future it is the literal point of venture capital. Gain adoption, then exploit to the maximum extent possible.
It’s fine to use these kind of tools, just don’t get too attached and be ready for the rug pull.
This extends way beyond the superficial toxic license stuff. There is a lot of legal ambiguity around copyleft licenses and most companies just don't want to deal with it unless it's absolutely unavoidable.
Congrats to Can! I am using Herdr and i think its a great tool. A modern solo dev success story , very inspirational.
I see some negative comments here that I could understand why funding scares them when it comes to their open source tool but like.. atleast congratulate the guy.
Yeah I was using cmux but it was Mac only and now I run herdr on my wsl and tunnel in from Mac and it’s awesome that it just mirrors everything. I like it and congrats to the founder
This title is killing me. "The runtime stays open" is such a heavy, attention grabbing sentence, it's all I can stare at on the front page. It's the type of writing that makes me hate working with LLMs, because it's so powerful at monopolizing my attention, and makes it difficult for me to focus on any of the other words on the page (whether the front page, or the comments page).
“The noun verbs.” is such an incredibly Claudeish sentence. The other models don’t do that stuff. I’d say it’s actually biggest tell for Claude writing.
A nice little asciinema demo would be helpful on the TUI page. I should be able to see what it is, how it presents the contained agents, etc.
I've been evaluating a few of these (and built one into another project I was working on, almost by accident), and am mostly looking for a frontend agnostic, terminal only (not harness) which can submit instructions to agents one line at at time with rate-limiting.
I was also surprised by tmux being built on shared memory when I tried to route it over a vsock to a VM. One of the annoyances with tmux is it's failure to forward environment changes to the individual tabs (such as an option when attaching), or allow for something like a ssh-agent forwarder (shouldn't be built in though).
As a relatively recent herdr user, I’ll say (1) congratulations and (2) the thing that was most attractive was the seeming orthogonality of the tool. It sits apart, interfaces with subordinate programs in a few clearly delineated ways, and integrates them only as much as the user desires. Critically, “no integration just show me the terminal output of my program” is an option, and a useful one!
I appreciate that discipline and respect for your user in the current tool, and hope to be a paying customer of a similarly values-aligned business you’ll build on top of it!
Over the last year I ended up duct taping a lot of functionality onto tmux to get what these new age multiplexers set out to do (session launch, live agent status, etc). And it works, but it definitely feels like duct tape.
I'm not sure the tmux project wants to evolve to support this natively so for now herdr seems like one of the best open and forkable options available. Considering how little I've had to really touch my tmux setup after getting it going I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world if the FOSS community maintains a deshittified fork of herdr, should it come to that.
I've been wondering what the point of a lot of these new multiplexer projects are when tmux is so extensible. I'd be curious to see eactly what you've done. Care to share a tmux config?
I started noticing problems with MCP auth state failing inside herdr, but working in a normal terminal session or with tmux, so I switched back to using tmux and it's been flawless. I also noticed that herdr was causing errors/warnings in ordinary terminal sessions so it's more trouble than it's worth at the moment (at least for me). It's a shame though, since I otherwise think it's a good tool.
I am going to be PRing herdr to stagex as it is my daily driver. This will give it a totally independent release process with multiple parties bootstrapping, reproducing, and signing deterministic binaries for it alongside our tmux releases.
We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu.
As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release.
Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better.
My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.
I built hive that’s similar to herdr but sits beside tmux instead. It provides a nice status UI on top of tmux instead of building the multiplexer. It also has a bunch of other utilities for working with agents like a message bus and task management framework.
I thought I'd share that hydra recently added support for herdr directly. It is an agent multiplexer of its own, but can directly create herdr tabs for sessions:
Congratulations! I came across herdr a few weeks ago and I've been daily driving it ever since. I've tried a few other tools like Emdash and Superset but Herdr is the only one that did a decent job rendering Claude code UI and didn't randomly crash and could run on a remote server.
I've been using Herdr for a while now, but I'd like a multiplexer that's also a meta-harness that I can connect to remotely. I know others have setups that work, I just haven't quite figured it out yet.
Moshi has an integration with Herdr; you can connect to your herdr sessions over mosh, your touches register as mouse clicks in the UI (which is minimally rendered above the shell), and there’s a shortcut bar which can issue herdr-keymapped commands.
It’s not open source, and costs a few bucks, but it works well and has live Claude/Codex/etc notifications if you are willing to install a hook daemon on your hosts with homebrew. I was looking for batteries-included “code from my iPhone” after trying a bunch of self-hosted stuff, now I connect to my Macs over Tailscale and get dropped right into multiplexer sessions with rich status notifications.
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.
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?
I am a HUGE herdr fan - discovered it a few months ago and it's exactly what I need for my workflow. Thousands of others have discovered it as well, which is awesome.
I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is.
Here's hoping this one's different...
(PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)
It’s literally the VC playbook, the whole point of the funding is to undermine competitors with subsidized/free products and then raise prices/enshittify. Anyone who thinks it’ll be different this time is fooling themselves.
> YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification
It doesn't have to be that way. YC partners are supportive if you just want to take the YC funding and nothing more, keeping the team small and just focusing on making the product better for customers. Indeed YC advises against taking VC if you don't need it.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm but in case its not, being capable of doing something and having the desire and resources to do it are not the same thing
Wow, congrats! Can you discuss how you got YCombinator to select your open source project? I know they sometimes fund open source… I’ve been building several large platforms since 2011 but I have never considered applying like that.
Quick question: Would you have actually donated to Herdr if they were asking for donations? I don't think any of you would have, unless stated otherwise.
So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0.
You have to pay and support the tools you use or else the VCs will do it for you so you can't complain when scenarios like this keep happening.
I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. Starting an open source project and using it to attract VC funding is one path.
> I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free.
This software was "free" (as in libre) and costed $0 and until now, it was licensed under AGPL 3. But contrary to one common misbelief in open source and free software, the maintenance is not free at all.
> The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that.
In the case of this project which took off, why would you expect the maintainer to work on the project for free?
When I moved to herdr I specifically looked for a donate / purchase button on their website and it wasn't anywhere to be found (at least in a prominent location).
I gladly donate / pay subscriptions to software I use regularly... but the company has a responsibility to make it obvious on how to do so
> Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too?
You are straw-manning a point no-one made. Herdr is open source and if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$. Clearly the donations were no-where enough and raising money was.
The point is maintaining open source projects for free is NOT sustainable and most HNers in this thread clearly struggle with not understanding that.
> This status quo is fine.
Seems like you would want him to work for free, then wait until the author becomes demotivated and then he abandons the project entirely and we'll see a new post about why Herdr got abandoned.
> if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$.
That's a bad-faith dilemma, you know it. The users can want to see it maintained without necessarily having the money, userbase or motivation to sponsor the lead dev. It's not criminal to have a tight pocketbook, and that's why free devtools succeed while paid ones rot. There will be always be a FOSS version of Herdr, and thanks to vibe coding it will probably retain feature parity with the paid version.
Everyone is happier with this arrangement, you're one of the only ones fulminating at the outcome.
> Seems like you would want him to work for free
Clearly he's content releasing the software for free. Let me guess, you're going to complain that the free market "forced" him to work without pay?
Yep. It's funny how much open source maximalists harm their own cause. Everything must be "free", ergo everything must be VC or big tech backed because free doesn't put bread on the table, so in the end devs just put more power in the hands of corporations and less power in the hands of themselves and other independent devs/small businesses, and then have the gall to complain when everything gets enshittified.
Congrats to Can on the pre-seed funding. genuinely wishing you all the best.
The terminal multiplexer / multi-agent coding space is getting very crowded. YC alone has funded many competing startups in this space: herdr, Superset, cmux, Emdash, Orca, Bullet, Conductor (Conductor was in YC before pivoting from chat->coding). I’m probably missing a few, and that’s before counting companies outside YC such as Superlogical and Agentastic.dev (by yours truly).
One thing I find particularly interesting is the role of open source in this market.
A lot of these products started open source (i assume as a tactical way to gain traction and build a community). But after the early traction phase or raise funding, the incentives seem to change.
Being open source by itself is not a product differentiator in this market. The features required for string positioning (orchestration, cloud, custom agents, enterprise features, hosted infrastructure, etc.) often end up either closed source or available only through the hosted product.
That makes me wonder how much developers actually value OSS for this category. How much does it matter to you whether your IDE or coding environment is open source?
Is OSS important because you want to inspect the code, fork it, self-host it, avoid vendor lock-in, or simply because you trust open-source developer tools more? Or, for desktop software like IDEs is open source mostly a nice-to-have rather than a requirement? So I’m curious where HN lands on this
It's super important to me. I use Herdr every day and I maintain a whole stack of changes. From minor comfort tweaks that are just preference, to several larger changes like add jj workspace support and a WIP web based view (powered by xterm.js).
This is not the only project like this too. Many of my devtools are piling up changes. I try to upstream changes where it makes sense, but many times they are either very bespoke, or I can't be bothered to do them "right" (for example for the jj workspace change, I just ripped out git support, so I didn't have to futz with syncing the symantics up between the two and config and whatnot).
LLMs have made making personal changes to devtools so effortless that I am now extremely hesitant to use any non source available software at all.
I have been thinking about a possibly expanded market for source available software. I don't really care what the license of the software is, I'm not sharing it at all or using it commercially, so it's kinda a moot point. If someone made some amazing software and sold the source I'd definitely consider it. I know there are all sorts of practical business problems with that, but that aside I'm curious if others feel the same?
> LLMs have made making personal changes to devtools so effortless that I am now extremely hesitant to use any non source available software at all
This mirrors my view so totally it's crazy. If AI is ushering in the era of personal tooling, closing the harness is orthogonal to what users want.
> like add jj workspace support
care to share a pr :)
It's not anywhere near making PR ready (and never will be) but here is the branch [1]. I make no promises on it's functionality, and I only periodically rebase Herdr's latest over it. I have been using the jj change for awhile though with no issues. So YMMV.
You can also see the combined output of all my changes at [2], which Jujutsu makes so damn easy via megamerges.
1: https://github.com/giodamelio/herdr/tree/jj-workspace-migrat...
2: https://github.com/giodamelio/herdr/tree/combined-branch
i see your point, in that light what herdr is doing here make sense. keep some part open (e.g. runtime or whatever that means, or the front-end, or the user-facing logic, etc) and move the business-logic/etc to proprietary. So you get to customize the software to meet your needs, and at the same time to create some revenue incentive to grow the company.
alternative is to collect/sell usage data, which is icky, or provide something as a service (token usage, infra, plugins, etc)
Ya, I'm not sure even that would be enough though to be honest.
I am kinda imagining a structure for a theoretical dev tooling business that might be OSS Core, and Source Available additional features. I'm not sure if there is a generally accepted definition of Source Available, but I don't necessarily mean that the source is just out in public on the web. It could be sent to you when you purchase the product, and could maybe even be sold on an upgrade sort of model, where you pay again for the next "big version" of the software, like the good old days of desktop software.
I’m the founder of scape.work - and it’s precisely why we’re not free, not open source. I want to build something with a mission of helping people own their infrastructure around AI tooling locally. If I raise money I am legally bound to my shareholders to create value, as opposed to my customers and my mission. Bootstrapping has never made more sense, when code is so cheap.
In the case of my WIP Agent IDE, OSS is mandatory because the tool needs to be able to read its own source to improve itself.
I avoid closed source software because it’s often a pain to use on Linux.
They will all fail unless they’re acquired, which is its own kind of failure.
Indeed and once the funding comes in with more chefs in the kitchen the startups start losing touch and focus on funneling users to a platform instead of just improving the core product.
There exist also competitors not funded by YC, like me. I won't be on any of the lists because I'm not courting agents, I'm courting humans.
For me OSS is a weapon to be wielded. By making perfect software that cannot be improved upon, and making known my ownership of it, I'm am defending "embrace extend extinguish" attacks that would otherwise be damaging to me. Those attacks rely on being able to undercut a product's position in the market with a similarly positioned product that can be just slightly better and/or cheaper.
frankly with the level of complexity of IDEs, I just need a working product. In my mind it is closer to "photoshop" now than vim. I would probably pay for VSCode. I can't believe its free.
well, visual studio isn't free. Code is free, and at some point it got so good that folks didn't feel the need to pay for the main suite.
well thats on point for microsoft branding
In practice, I suspect the entire category will be folded into Claude Code and Codex (Anthropic is already trying with Claude Agents), and that will do 80% of the job at 0% of the cost and configuration effort.
External programs will still be useful for the tiny minority who wants different harnesses for different projects, but yeah, tiny minority.
in my experience, tools usually have a longer shelf-life than models/labs. e.g. terminals and IDEs have been around for much longer, and people tend to stick around with their preferred IDEs for much longer (years/decades).
One bad cycle and the next Opus 6 or GPT 7 might flop (think what happend to LLama4 or Gemini), and the user quickly switch to the next best thing. So it make sense to build your tooling to be model-agnostic.
> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem.
I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.
The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.
If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.
Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.
> if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it
No, it isn't; a client talking to an AGPLv3 service over a network API stays a separate program and is not touched by the license at all. Section 13 places obligations solely on whoever runs a modified version of the service, while remote users, API clients included, only gain the right to receive that service's source. So nothing on the client side must suddenly become AGPLv3, and the only thing that ever has to be shared is the AGPL'd program itself, not anything across the API boundary. The first half of your post is basically unfounded FUD; the second half tracks.
You may think this. I may think this. But what really matters is if the lawyers for your customers think this. It may be pure FUD, but AGPL projects have a tough time getting adoption in companies because they would rather avoid the problem than be wrong.
This is true, unfortunately. I've have had to walk away from a client because their software-illiterate lawyer didn't want me to build with copyleft dependencies.
It wasn't the only red flag in this case, but frustrating nonetheless.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.
They're right, but they're presenting it in a way as if the toxicity of AGPL is the actual truth, and not just the opinion of greedy corporations.
Being toxic to greedy corporations but beneficial to everyone else is the point of the GPL licenses.
But it’s not only toxic to the greedy corporations but all the others as well, hence
Why is it toxic for me to need to push my code to a git repo if I start using it in my services, if I'm not trying to act as a for-profit corporation?
You can totally make profits by selling services based on AGPL code btw, it's completely fine. As long as you redistribute your derivative work as AGPL too.
There's nothing toxic in the AGPL for you as long as you don't want to make that code proprietary (even without making profits)
No. There's no restriction of usage in the (A)GPL. Anyone, including big corps, can use AGPL software. Preventing them to use the software is not the point neither. The point is trying to ensure end user freedom.
They just choose avoid agpl software. Their loss. Unfortunately they also spread FUD on this and many commenters here happily convey it.
AGREED! Its sheer insanity to call the AGPL toxic. The license is actually quite simple if a little wordy. They should have accompanied it with a preamble that was super clear and to the point.So here it is in our 170 words for you to read, share, and use:
Copyright (c) [year] [copyright holders]
Permission is hereby granted to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files, to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies of the software, including for commercial purposes, subject to the following conditions:
If you distribute this software, or any work derived from it, you must release the complete source code under this same licence. If you modify this software and users interact with your version over a network — as a web application, an API, or a hosted service — you must offer those users the complete source code of your version, at no charge. All copies must include this copyright notice and this licence. You may not impose additional licence restrictions beyond this.
These permissions are irrevocable and royalty-free for the term of copyright. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. This is a plain-language summary. The full legal text of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, governs all use for you.
Same rights. Same freedoms only a little more opiniated delivery. Same business card. The only difference: when someone takes your code, tweakes it and builds a service on it, the tweaks, the improvements must come back.
How so? You might be thinking of SSPL.
Seems like the path is to use LLMs to launder code from VC funded efforts and their public codebases into codebases with a copyleft license. Otherwise you have to wait for the rug pull before taking action (Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao). It is fair use to train and create derivative works after all, as courts have ruled so far.
You can just take someone else's permissively licensed code and relicense it AGPL, or even proprietary if you want to. Corporations want it proprietary but the same trick works for copyleft.
For bonus points make sure your fork has better SEO than the original, so when someone who heard it's permissive embeds it in a proprietary product, you can sue them.
Was assuming worse case scenario from a licensing compatibility and copyright perspective.
Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code
Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.
I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money.
I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.
I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.
In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.
If he wants to make money he needs to sell licenses, not give them away for free. To that end, making the free version AGPL is generally a good move. It ensures people can get hooked on your product and when they start working at corporations they have to pay to keep using it.
Enshitification is 100% guaranteed with any vc backing. Maybe not now, but definitely in the future it is the literal point of venture capital. Gain adoption, then exploit to the maximum extent possible.
It’s fine to use these kind of tools, just don’t get too attached and be ready for the rug pull.
FUD, can’t take investment when your project actually enforces user freedom.
No money from investors
[flagged]
Any potential customers that matter have already been advised by their lawyers to not touch AGPL with a 10 meter pole. This includes Google:
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
This extends way beyond the superficial toxic license stuff. There is a lot of legal ambiguity around copyleft licenses and most companies just don't want to deal with it unless it's absolutely unavoidable.
Congrats to Can! I am using Herdr and i think its a great tool. A modern solo dev success story , very inspirational.
I see some negative comments here that I could understand why funding scares them when it comes to their open source tool but like.. atleast congratulate the guy.
Yeah I was using cmux but it was Mac only and now I run herdr on my wsl and tunnel in from Mac and it’s awesome that it just mirrors everything. I like it and congrats to the founder
This title is killing me. "The runtime stays open" is such a heavy, attention grabbing sentence, it's all I can stare at on the front page. It's the type of writing that makes me hate working with LLMs, because it's so powerful at monopolizing my attention, and makes it difficult for me to focus on any of the other words on the page (whether the front page, or the comments page).
“The noun verbs.” is such an incredibly Claudeish sentence. The other models don’t do that stuff. I’d say it’s actually biggest tell for Claude writing.
You should read the Herdr front page. Is so full of AIism it hurts my head.
it’s ok Claude we can see you
A nice little asciinema demo would be helpful on the TUI page. I should be able to see what it is, how it presents the contained agents, etc.
I've been evaluating a few of these (and built one into another project I was working on, almost by accident), and am mostly looking for a frontend agnostic, terminal only (not harness) which can submit instructions to agents one line at at time with rate-limiting.
I was also surprised by tmux being built on shared memory when I tried to route it over a vsock to a VM. One of the annoyances with tmux is it's failure to forward environment changes to the individual tabs (such as an option when attaching), or allow for something like a ssh-agent forwarder (shouldn't be built in though).
in the herdr homepage near the top there is an interactive demo that responds to your mouse clicks
As a relatively recent herdr user, I’ll say (1) congratulations and (2) the thing that was most attractive was the seeming orthogonality of the tool. It sits apart, interfaces with subordinate programs in a few clearly delineated ways, and integrates them only as much as the user desires. Critically, “no integration just show me the terminal output of my program” is an option, and a useful one!
I appreciate that discipline and respect for your user in the current tool, and hope to be a paying customer of a similarly values-aligned business you’ll build on top of it!
Okay, back to tmux it is then.
Over the last year I ended up duct taping a lot of functionality onto tmux to get what these new age multiplexers set out to do (session launch, live agent status, etc). And it works, but it definitely feels like duct tape.
I'm not sure the tmux project wants to evolve to support this natively so for now herdr seems like one of the best open and forkable options available. Considering how little I've had to really touch my tmux setup after getting it going I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world if the FOSS community maintains a deshittified fork of herdr, should it come to that.
I've been wondering what the point of a lot of these new multiplexer projects are when tmux is so extensible. I'd be curious to see eactly what you've done. Care to share a tmux config?
I started noticing problems with MCP auth state failing inside herdr, but working in a normal terminal session or with tmux, so I switched back to using tmux and it's been flawless. I also noticed that herdr was causing errors/warnings in ordinary terminal sessions so it's more trouble than it's worth at the moment (at least for me). It's a shame though, since I otherwise think it's a good tool.
I am going to be PRing herdr to stagex as it is my daily driver. This will give it a totally independent release process with multiple parties bootstrapping, reproducing, and signing deterministic binaries for it alongside our tmux releases.
We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu.
As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release.
Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better.
My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.
Try https://zmx.sh for a more minimalist tool
Give it a whirl with Workmux! I moved from Herdr to Workmux + Tmux about a month ago and am enjoying it. Significantly more flexibility.
I built hive that’s similar to herdr but sits beside tmux instead. It provides a nice status UI on top of tmux instead of building the multiplexer. It also has a bunch of other utilities for working with agents like a message bus and task management framework.
https://github.com/colonyops/hive
I am guessing this now directly competes with mitchellh's multiplexer / Superlogical.
I just wouldn't bet against Mitchell. He doesn't need the money. He does it for the love of it.
I thought I'd share that hydra recently added support for herdr directly. It is an agent multiplexer of its own, but can directly create herdr tabs for sessions:
https://github.com/smagnuso/hydra-acp
Oh no, I was using it. What's a good replacement? Guess I'll go back to tmux.
I’m a fan of zellij
You've joined an accelerator, not gone public, of course you're not ready to rug pull
Congratulations! I came across herdr a few weeks ago and I've been daily driving it ever since. I've tried a few other tools like Emdash and Superset but Herdr is the only one that did a decent job rendering Claude code UI and didn't randomly crash and could run on a remote server.
Congrats Can. Love your product, it has become the default way to orchestrate agents in my terminal.
Ironically a lot of YC hate despite the fact that we are literally in their forum.
Like the articles, hate the influence of VC on open source. Even if it stays open it still gets ruined. See Bun for an example.
I don't see how Bun is "ruined". In fact, I personally see Bun as example of the opposite — Rust rewrite seems like a huge success across the board.
I'm personally using the 1.4 canary (the rust rewrite version) and definitely plan on continuing using it in my future projects.
I don't think it's about YC specifically, more about VC-driven enshittification of open source software in general.
I've been using Herdr for a while now, but I'd like a multiplexer that's also a meta-harness that I can connect to remotely. I know others have setups that work, I just haven't quite figured it out yet.
Moshi has an integration with Herdr; you can connect to your herdr sessions over mosh, your touches register as mouse clicks in the UI (which is minimally rendered above the shell), and there’s a shortcut bar which can issue herdr-keymapped commands.
It’s not open source, and costs a few bucks, but it works well and has live Claude/Codex/etc notifications if you are willing to install a hook daemon on your hosts with homebrew. I was looking for batteries-included “code from my iPhone” after trying a bunch of self-hosted stuff, now I connect to my Macs over Tailscale and get dropped right into multiplexer sessions with rich status notifications.
https://getmoshi.app/
i just ssh to my machine (from phone etc) and run `herdr` to resume.
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.
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?
Honestly, how are you guys running multiple agents, presumably with them all writing code?
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 feel like there's not enough coding work to justify multiple agents, that part doesn't take long, and then it's back to design again.
Thanks god I didn't replace tmux
I thought the A2A protocol from Google would solve this of our personal agents speaking with company agents
90% certain A2A is dead....
I haven’t seen one of those classic Herdr/Herdly tech names in a while now.
Oh man - herdr is great. This will not be net good. Sigh.
I am a HUGE herdr fan - discovered it a few months ago and it's exactly what I need for my workflow. Thousands of others have discovered it as well, which is awesome.
I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is.
Here's hoping this one's different...
(PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)
> I am a big YC fan in general
Genuine question - why?
It’s literally the VC playbook, the whole point of the funding is to undermine competitors with subsidized/free products and then raise prices/enshittify. Anyone who thinks it’ll be different this time is fooling themselves.
> YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification
It doesn't have to be that way. YC partners are supportive if you just want to take the YC funding and nothing more, keeping the team small and just focusing on making the product better for customers. Indeed YC advises against taking VC if you don't need it.
Yes there are companies such as Streak. It's possible to pay back early funders so it's a win-win.
> Here's hoping this one's different...
It won't be.
Yeah, it’s great but with this, it’s probably the time to find an alternative, I probably can see where this will be in a year or so.
why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)
I can't tell if this is sarcasm but in case its not, being capable of doing something and having the desire and resources to do it are not the same thing
It's a management tool for multiple superintelligent agents, right? Just tell one of them to fork herdr so VC can't make it worse on purpose.
Congrats on momentum! Well earned. Love Herdr.
If they just stayed opn they could reinvest the penultimate e in calling themselves Herder.
wtf is "runtime"
What does stays open mean
It means the headline was vomited out by an LLM.
It's a tool for managing 20 LLM agents at the same time isn't it? They know their audience loves this slop.
could just host it on the cloud?
Tbh it doesn’t bother me entirely. I love this tool so much I’d pay for it.
VC funding can enshitify things but it can also improve them. Here’s hoping for the latter.
Wow, congrats! Can you discuss how you got YCombinator to select your open source project? I know they sometimes fund open source… I’ve been building several large platforms since 2011 but I have never considered applying like that.
Would something like this qualify:
https://github.com/Qbix
https://github.com/Intercoin
https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud
the secret sauce is traction
Quick question: Would you have actually donated to Herdr if they were asking for donations? I don't think any of you would have, unless stated otherwise.
So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0.
You have to pay and support the tools you use or else the VCs will do it for you so you can't complain when scenarios like this keep happening.
I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. Starting an open source project and using it to attract VC funding is one path.
> I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free.
This software was "free" (as in libre) and costed $0 and until now, it was licensed under AGPL 3. But contrary to one common misbelief in open source and free software, the maintenance is not free at all.
> The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that.
In the case of this project which took off, why would you expect the maintainer to work on the project for free?
When I moved to herdr I specifically looked for a donate / purchase button on their website and it wasn't anywhere to be found (at least in a prominent location).
I gladly donate / pay subscriptions to software I use regularly... but the company has a responsibility to make it obvious on how to do so
I actually donate to a bunch of tools I use.
Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? This status quo is fine.
> Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too?
You are straw-manning a point no-one made. Herdr is open source and if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$. Clearly the donations were no-where enough and raising money was.
The point is maintaining open source projects for free is NOT sustainable and most HNers in this thread clearly struggle with not understanding that.
> This status quo is fine.
Seems like you would want him to work for free, then wait until the author becomes demotivated and then he abandons the project entirely and we'll see a new post about why Herdr got abandoned.
> if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$.
That's a bad-faith dilemma, you know it. The users can want to see it maintained without necessarily having the money, userbase or motivation to sponsor the lead dev. It's not criminal to have a tight pocketbook, and that's why free devtools succeed while paid ones rot. There will be always be a FOSS version of Herdr, and thanks to vibe coding it will probably retain feature parity with the paid version.
Everyone is happier with this arrangement, you're one of the only ones fulminating at the outcome.
> Seems like you would want him to work for free
Clearly he's content releasing the software for free. Let me guess, you're going to complain that the free market "forced" him to work without pay?
Yep. It's funny how much open source maximalists harm their own cause. Everything must be "free", ergo everything must be VC or big tech backed because free doesn't put bread on the table, so in the end devs just put more power in the hands of corporations and less power in the hands of themselves and other independent devs/small businesses, and then have the gall to complain when everything gets enshittified.