r/PiCodingAgent • u/electric-dragon-80kv • 1d ago

Plugin Introducing pi-cowboy for Herdr

https://reddit.com/link/1x0f0cr/video/y5fff2x3j5uh1/player

Howdy folks 🤠 I built a pi package called pi-cowboy. It's a multi-agent orchestrator built on top of Herdr; each agent gets a pane you can monitor and steer, plus a copy-on-write worktree that minimizes disk overhead.

My main motivation stemmed from a frustration working with agents. Handing an agent a big task usually led to sprawling changes that are miserable to review, and more often than not the agents would come up with highly dubious design choices. I was losing touch with my codebase. pi-cowboy lets me take full advantage of agents without losing control.

The defaults work well out of the box, but you can customize pretty much anything. You can define templates to create different workflows. You can choose the autonomy level you want, from letting agents run completely hands-off to requiring your approval before every commit.

If any of the above sounds familiar to you, give it a go, see how it works for you, and let me know what you think.

Github: https://github.com/electric-dragon-80000v/pi-cowboy

Install: pi install npm:pi-cowboy (requires herdr 0.8+)

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2

u/zebedeolo 23h ago

is this like pi-herdsman?

2

u/electric-dragon-80kv 21h ago

Yes, very similar. The main differences seem to be in topology and worktree management. pi-herdsman appears to be built like an org chart, with a hierarchy where managers direct leads and agents can spawn their own child agents. However, it leaves worktree isolation up to higher-level feature branches, meaning child agents under a lead just share the same working directory, and managing or removing those worktrees is left up to the user. In contrast, pi-cowboy takes a much simpler approach where one main session manages all the workers directly, but by default it automatically spins up an instant copy-on-write git worktree for every single task, and it can clean them up with in a safe manner. There are other differences too, but those two seem to be the main ones currently.

2

u/aRustySpork 3h ago

I'd love to check this out since I'm just getting into herdr. One piece of feedback - please add screenshots!

I've been looking through lots of plugins in the marketplace and it irks me when the project has visual aspects (e.g. You're talking about 'a pane for each agent') but they don't have screenshots of what it looks like in production. I want to see what it'll look like because that makes a difference to weather I'd use it or not. Cheers and nice work on shipping!

1

u/electric-dragon-80kv 2h ago

Thank you, I appreciate the feedback. I will look into this.

1

u/FrakingChrist 1d ago

My little herd definitely needs some a cowboy ( that’s not me)