herdr (GitHub Repo)
GitHub
Herdr is a new terminal tool that lets you manage multiple AI agents at once, like a mission control for your command line. It matters because agents keep running even after you detach, so you can walk away and reattach later, even over SSH.
Based on reporting by GitHub — read the original for the full story.
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There's a new open-source project called herdr, and it's aimed squarely at the growing mess of running multiple AI agents at once. Instead of juggling separate terminal windows or losing track of which agent is stuck, working, or finished, herdr gives you a single terminal-based dashboard showing every agent's real status at a glance.
What sets it apart is persistence. You can detach from a session and the agents keep chugging along in the background. Reattach later from a different terminal, or even over SSH, and everything picks up where it left off. Herdr says sessions survive restarts too, which matters a lot if you've ever had a long-running agent task get wiped out by a reboot or a dropped connection.
The tool isn't just for humans, either. Herdr exposes a socket API that lets agents themselves spawn panes, read output, and wait on one another — effectively giving agents the ability to orchestrate other agents through the same interface a person would use. It supports both keyboard-driven control, tmux-style with prefix keys, and mouse interaction like clicking, dragging, and splitting panes, letting you switch between the two depending on the moment rather than committing to one style.
Herdr is built as a single Rust binary with no Electron involved, so it runs inside whatever terminal you're already using rather than forcing a new app on you. Installation is a one-line curl script, or available through Homebrew and mise, with a PowerShell installer for a Windows beta. There's also a plugin system with a marketplace for extending panes and workflows.
The project is dual-licensed — AGPL-3.0-or-later for open source use, with commercial licenses available for organizations that can't work under AGPL. The team behind it says herdr is being built full-time and in the open, and is actively looking for sponsors to fund development toward what they describe as a real agent runtime.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
A terminal-native, no-Electron tool for herding AI agents is a refreshingly unglamorous idea in a space obsessed with flashy dashboards, and the socket API letting agents manage other agents is the part actually worth watching. Persistence across detach and reboot is the kind of boring reliability feature that quietly becomes essential once people start running agents unattended for hours. The AGPL-with-commercial-option licensing is a sensible hedge for a solo-feeling, full-time open project trying to survive without VC money — expect more infra tools to follow this exact playbook.”
Read more about this at: GitHub
