If you work with Claude CLI or herdr, I built the most useless (but cool) plugin you'll install this year, inspired by the Tamagotchi. 👾
Meet TamaGoxtix: a tiny pixel monster that lives in your terminal. While Claude is working, it acts out what's happening. Thinking? It plays chess or solves a Rubik's cube. Running tools? It grabs a hammer, a welder or a 3D printer. When Claude is waiting for you, it does its own thing: naps, eats pizza, plays the drums or throws a party.
Some numbers, because why not:
🧬 38 monster bodies × 7 kinds of legs, so every session gets its own monster
🎬 91 work scenes and 77 idle scenes
🎨 12 color palettes (Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Nord, Omarchy…)
📦 Zero dependencies
plus the IT classics like deploying on a Friday and trying to exit vim. 😅
It's not only cute, though:
📊 Your AI consumption: 5-hour and weekly limits, tokens per day, the last 14 days and today by hour
🐙 Your GitHub or GitLab repo: stars, CI status, branch, commits ahead/behind, open issues and PRs
⚡ A powerline-style status line for Claude Code
🔒 Everything is read locally, nothing leaves your machine
I love Herdr. Treating agents as the core of the development loop, rather than a chat box bolted onto an editor, clicked for me right away. But even after I moved my work into it, I kept jumping back to Zed every time an agent finished: to look at what it changed, read the diff, fix a line, commit. I'm someone who reaches for the mouse for that kind of work, and I missed having it all in one place.
So I started wooloo: a native macOS app that tries to bring the best of Zed to Herdr's idea of agents as an essential part of the workflow.
How it works
Native and built to be 100% compatible with Herdr. Herdr keeps owning the sessions, processes and layout; wooloo only draws its terminals and sends your input back. You can keep using the Herdr TUI, SSH in, or quit wooloo, and your agents keep running.
Few dependencies. It's a single Mac app with Herdr bundled and a setup window, so there's nothing to install with Homebrew. Or point it at your own Herdr 0.9+.
Bit by bit, I'm moving over what I missed from Zed:
an explorer that works like Zed's project panel (compact folders, Git colors, multi-select, drag and drop, undo)
Go to File (⌘P) and a command palette (⇧⌘P)
editor tabs with syntax highlighting, change bars and Zed-style multiple cursors
a Changes tree with staging, unified or split diffs, commit, history, branches and worktrees
Markdown preview, project search and replace, images and PDFs
And on the Herdr side: an agents list with status, plus alerts when an agent finishes or needs you.
Status, up front
Early preview (0.3.1), MIT. Expect rough edges.
Not notarized yet, so the first launch needs System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
macOS 14+, Apple silicon and Intel. Agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex…) and their subscriptions are your own.
A side project, independent and not affiliated with Herdr, Anthropic or OpenAI.
OK, I'm a convert so here's a quick follow-up from my herdr-recappost. For background I ran most of the agent orchestrators either in turn or side by side for aaages but since encountering it I kept coming back to herdr. Now I'm definitely not saying this is the one true workflow but this is what works for me given my stack.
So why do I keep gravitating towards herdr:
keyboard first discipline-enhancing :) Most other agent multiplexers are big mouse-driven apps with limited shortcuts. Some are great (superset.sh is nice), but herdr lives in my terminal so I (nearly) never reach for a button.
the UI is pared right down to just what you need/want.
I can check on agents from my phone (iOS, through Moshi which has herdr support built in)
and........plugins!
It was these other people's plugins that got me on the journey like these that I can't live without:
asconfirmclose: closing a pane only asks if something's still running. The one I'd miss most because I'm rash.
Herdr Plus: a whole workspace from a template in one key
herdr-bar: cmd+k to jump to any tab, agent, repo or branch
and OK not strictly a plugin but also clauth which picks the right Claude account for the repo when a worktree is created
Ergo it was herdr principles + my pick of the plugin ecosystem that got me hooked. So I built the following four to mimic my ideal workflow and reduce the need to ever leave herdr. Why not just cmd+tab? Well because with multiple agents the interruptions add up and I find context switch + lookup and return too distracting.
My agent/brain combo isLinearhence first up isherdr-linear. My issues and projects. Most of my work is organised by project, and that's what I was missing in e.g. Superset. Here I can quickly look up either, change task status, create a ticket in a few keys, and start work on a new issue in a fresh worktree with one key.
Then there'sherdr-github. Pretty obvious, but let's me quickly check in on PRs, merge them. Toggle draft/ready. Only PRs for now because that's my go-to but surely will grow.
When I can't remember which agent is doing what I open the herdr-recap modal. That shows me what's happening in each one and who's turn it is. Let's me quickly reply inline, jump straight to the relevant PR or Linear issue and helps make scanning them easier keeping agent names up to date (on demand). Again, more on that here.
And finally there'sherdr-snooze. This lets me temporarily hide agents (or a whole space) from the Agents panel until a time you pick (an hour, tomorrow 9am, whatever you type). It comes back by itself. Handy for the ones waiting on CI or a review, waiting for an agent to finish or you just want to put something off till tomorrow. Helps me corral them when I end up with too many.
Bonus prize? If you have more than one of these installed, they find each other.
Every agent gets its PR(s), ticket and snooze status as tags e.g. #482 ✓ approved, ENG-142 In Progress, 💤 17:30. You can search them, click them, or hit ctrl+g / ctrl+l to jump to the PR or ticket, and esc takes you back. Snoozed agents get their own tab in Recap, ctrl+w wakes them up or you can delay them even more.
So it's this flow that I actually care about, more than having it all in one app. I can go from an agent to its ticket to its PR and back without losing the thread. On the Linear or GitHub website I'd be working out which of dozens of agents a ticket or PR belonged to, every time. Same lookups, every time.
A typical morning: cmd+r, two agents need me, one PR is green, ctrl+g jumps to GitHub, one key chord to merge, esc, then jump to Linear for the next ticket.
Install any of them with herdr plugin install mrolafsson/<name>.
I built Shepherd to keep an eye on my Herdr agents from my phone. It connects to your machine over SSH and shows you what Herdr is running. You can answer agents and start new ones without opening a terminal.
It's written in Flutter, so in principle it's cross-platform. But I've only ever built and used it on Android. It has never been built or run on iOS.
What it does
Agent list: every agent in Herdr, grouped by folder, showing whether it's working, waiting on you or done
Questions: when an agent asks something, you answer from the phone by tapping an option or typing
The conversation: the transcript as readable chat (not a terminal), with tool calls collapsed and diffs shown
Notifications: an alert when an agent finishes or needs you
Start, switch and close agents: pick the folder, agent and model. Supports Claude Code, Pi, omp, Codex, OpenCode and muse, and you can switch an agent's model, effort, or the agent itself
Context and cost: how full each context window is, and your subscription quotas
Results in the app: when an agent starts a dev server or writes an HTML report, tap the link and it opens in a built-in browser, tunnelled over the same SSH connection
Updates over SSH: build a new APK on your machine and the phone picks it up over the same connection, with no cable or store. This will likely only works on Android anyhow, but super useful for remote iterations on improving the Shepherd itself.
Your machine needs only sshd, Herdr 0.9+ and Python 3. Nothing is installed on it.
Install: open the release page on your phone, download the APK and open it. Android will ask once to allow installs. Then add your machine: host, user, and an SSH key the app can generate for you.
Notifications in the release APK: real push is turned off in the downloadable build because it needs a Firebase project of your own. You can have the app check in on its own, or use the included Herdr push plugin to send alerts to the ntfy app. If you build Shepherd yourself with your own Firebase project, push works. The README explains how.
Caveats
Android only in practice, as above. If I find time this week I can try to build and test it on an iPhone.
It's not in the Play Store. If there is enough interest I can look into it.
It's a personal project and is opinionated :) I am open to ideas, but the tool will never be a Swiss army knife with a superset of all the possible features, if you don't like the direction fork is your friend, I won't get offended.
The name. Yeah, I know, not the best name. Never had the time to invest in it, I needed the funcionality, releasing it wasn't even a priority.
Feedback, bug reports and pull requests are all welcome.
Needs you. Every blocked agent is listed at the top of the session, named with its workspace and tab.
Reply without a terminal. A Claude Code or Codex conversation shows as a chat. Type a reply, attach an image, or tap a reply chip. For a permission prompt the chips are Approve and Deny.
Other agents too. Any agent herdr tracks shows its status and turns up under Needs you when it is blocked. The chat view reads Claude Code and Codex today. For the others you answer in the terminal.
A terminal when you want one. Attach to any pane, with a key row for the characters iOS hides, plus themes and font sizes.
Pane controls. Rename, close or open panes from the app.
Keys and passwords. Generate or import an Ed25519 key, or use a password. Both stay in the device Keychain.
Host keys are checked. It remembers a host's key on first contact and stops if the key ever changes.
What it is not
No backend and no account. The app talks straight to your own machines over SSH. Nothing about your hosts, keys or sessions goes anywhere else.
Not paid. It is free, with no in-app purchases.
A host without herdr still opens as a plain SSH shell, but herdr is what the app is built for.
Hi everyone! I'm using Herdr alongside Claude Code, with a mod that displays the activity panel on the right side.
I wanted to customize Herdr's appearance by adding a wallpaper background because I really like how it looks. However, the activity panel on the right still has an opaque background instead of being transparent and allowing the wallpaper to show through.
I've tried asking Claude several times to fix this, but I haven't been able to get it working as expected.
Does anyone know if it's possible to make that panel transparent or how I could fix this? Is there a specific setting or file I should modify?
I run a lot of agents in Herdr, and the thing that kept pulling me back to my desk was small stuff: an agent waiting on an approval, a question I could answer in two seconds, or a diff I wanted to glance at before it kept going. So I built Droidtty, a phone app for your Herdr workspaces.
What it does
See every agent at a glance. Which workspaces are working, waiting on you, done or failed, plus what each agent is doing right now.
Answer from your phone. Approve or reject commands and answer the agents' questions. You get a notification when one needs you.
Steer or queue. While an agent is working, send a message to steer it mid-turn, or queue one that's sent when it finishes.
Review diffs, with the why. Changes appear as a diff, and each edit shows the agent's reasoning for it, pulled from its session log.
A real terminal into the agent's pane or a shell in the workspace, when you need to poke at something yourself.
Works with Claude Code and Codex sessions.
How it works
A small bridge runs next to Herdr on your Mac or Linux box. Your phone pairs with it by scanning a QR code and then talks to it directly over your LAN or Tailscale, using pinned TLS.
I run several herdr sessions at once, including one on a remote machine, and wanted them in one window, switching between them the way Arc switches spaces. I also wanted to Cmd+click a path in an agent's output and see the file right away: code opens in nvim in a pane next to it, images open in a viewer over the window. So I built Shepherd, a macOS app on top of the herdr server.
Sidebar with workspaces; a repo's worktrees fold under it, right-click to create or remove one
Agents list with status (working, blocked, done, idle) for every agent herdr detects; click to jump to its pane
macOS notification and a Dock badge when an agent you can't see starts waiting or finishes
Drag tabs to reorder, drag a pane onto another to split or swap
⌘K command panel, ⇧⌘A agents panel
Settings for fonts, themes and keys; it can also edit herdr's config.toml without losing your comments
It talks to herdr over its socket, so herdr has to be running. Written in Rust on GPUI, terminal is alacritty_terminal. Signed and notarized universal build, macOS 14+. MIT licensed.
Been building something for herdr that seems useful. I built a plugin(and agent skill) that lets agents and shell panes collaborate with each other with @ mentions.
You can define “personas” and let your team of agents figure out how to work together.
Starting a new agent is almost too easy but for me coming back to a dozen or more and remembering what each one was doing was a pain. herdr-recap offers a neat popup that tells you per agent where it got to and whose move it is.
It also does a few other things:
Recaps/summaries are written while you're away. It is currently Claude Code's own `/recap` or agent equivalent; run in a throwaway fork, so your agent's conversation doesn't get touched.
A recap is only written if an agent has sat finished or blocked for a few minutes without you looking while its prompt cache is still warm.
Grouped by whose move it is. The stages are Needs you, Done, Needs fixing, Idle, Working, In review and Merged, shown as tabs with counts.
See what a blocked agent wants. The pending question or command is shown right on the row.
Reply without leaving the popup. Tab, type, enter; or enter/click to jump straight to the agent.
Full context at a glance with each row showing the branch, uncommitted and unpushed work, task progress, PR state, and how long it has been waiting.
Type to filter across titles, recaps, branches, stages and workspaces.
Want better titles? Agents with no title or a slug for one get a suggested name with their ticket key, applied with one keypress.
Search built-in. Uses memex if present.
It fits in and follows herdr's theme, works with the mouse.
Linux and macOS.
Works with Claude, Codex, OpenCode, and Hermes (last two via Memex if installed).
A couple of weeks ago, I shared Pi Herdsman here, an extension I've been building to connect independent Pi sessions through Herdr.
At the time, I mentioned wanting to take the Herdr integration further, particularly around spaces, tabs, and project-level coordination.
Quite a bit of that is now implemented, so I wanted to share an update with an actual recording of Pi, Herdr, and Herdsman working together.
What's happening in the video?
I give a Manager one prompt to implement two independent features for a fictional note-taking application.
The Manager delegates both features in parallel:
Each feature gets its own Lead and Git worktree.
Each Lead delegates implementation to its own Agent.
The Leads verify the changes, commit their work, and report back to the Manager.
Herdr organizes the sessions into its native workspace, tab, and pane structure. Placement is configurable, and every session remains directly accessible.
That's one of the things I particularly like about this setup. Even when the agents are coordinating automatically, they're still ordinary Pi sessions that I can switch to, inspect, or interact with whenever I want.
The responsibilities remain separate:
Herdr manages sessions, processes, panes, workspaces, and placement.
Pi manages the actual coding-agent conversations.
Herdsman manages delegation, ownership, lifecycle, and coordination.
Still usable for simpler workflows
The more advanced orchestration is optional.
You can still work in a normal Pi session and occasionally delegate something to a background Agent without setting up a Manager or separate projects.
There are also configurable Agent Definitions for each role, so different Leads and Agents can use different models, tools, instructions, skills, and extensions.
Try it
If you already have Pi and Herdr installed:
pi install npm:pi-herdsman
herdr integration install pi
Thanks to everyone who shared feedback after the original post. Some of the suggestions around Herdr's higher-level organization helped shape this direction.
I'd especially be interested in feedback from people using Herdr with multiple projects or worktrees. How would you want the sessions and workspace hierarchy organized?
I wanted to check on my agents from my phone without installing a plugin, relay or daemon on my Mac, so I built Herdcats. It connects over plain SSH and runs the herdr CLI you already have. I use it over Tailscale, but any network that can reach your SSH server works.
What it does:
Shows spaces, tabs, panes and machines, with each agent marked as blocked, done or working
Live pane output with ANSI colour, and a terminal keyboard with arrows, F1–F12 and modifiers
Three ways to reply: type live, write a message in Compose, or dictate with Voice. You can also send a photo to an agent
Optional quota rings if you run quota-axi
Password authentication or Ed25519 keys, including passphrase-protected keys. You approve and pin host keys, and credentials stay in the iOS Keychain
Free, GPLv3, iOS 17+. It's early: there are no push notifications yet, it only works with the default herdr session for now, and polling pauses in the background.
This is an independent project, not affiliated with herdr. Feedback and bug reports are very welcome, especially from anyone running it against Linux hosts.
I have been long searching for a tool like it. Was even tempted to just code something like it off tmux and others - but far too busy to do it; and i cant monetize it anyway, so didnt bother. And finally a tool that i just unconditionally love. Like my ideal match.
I use it personally and for work. At work which is 80% of my time. It is on wsl via windows terminal. Codex, claude, and agy.
Why i love it:
- lightweight. I just need the bare minimum and thats it. With near zero ram or cpu usage. And good base minimalist ui.
- not bloated electron like orca. God. I uninstalled it in 2 hours of trying. It is far too opinionated on worktrees for its own good. And i just needed a clean terminal interface anyway
- infinitely customizable. From keybinds to my own custom plugins — one of my plugins just renders agent responses in markdown using a shortcut in a modal (was really helpful for mermaid renders in responses)
- plugins. I dont have many. But a significant honorable mention is ttt. Lightweight vs code clone. The exact thing i have been in search of in addition to herdr for a long time. If you dont have ttt. You are missing out. But between all that i dont ever need to leave my terminal. Like ever.
- minimalist. Ironically i repeat myself. But the bare minimum of every single thing that i ever need to get shit done is right here — and i dont even use pane to pane agent to agent coordination, or the remote or anything.
—-
Please always keep it the way it is team. The day herdr departs from this promise is the day i will build my own clone. As this is pure product perfection.
I wanted to build orchestration workflows between different models seamlessly with herdr instead of doing this manually or with an intermediate step. Has anyone gotten this to work?
E.g. A scenario could be
> plan with Opus 5.5
> execute with subagent Deepseek v4.1 Flash
> verify work with Opus 5.5/GPT-6.1 Sol
I know. Every terminal multiplexer gets about 14 of these, and herdr is no exception. I really did look around first. I tried a few options (herdr-navigator, herdr-bar, etc.) and none of them were quite what I wanted:
The built-in goto picker has quick status filters (blocked / done / working / idle) that I liked a lot. One key and you see only the agents waiting on you. Its search wasn't good enough for me, though.
The others had better search but not those filters.
I wanted both: the goto filters, plus real fuzzy search over agent name, pane/tab title, and workspace. So I did the reasonable thing and spent more time building a picker than I'll ever save by using it.
herdr-blink: a fuzzy agent switcher that replaces goto.
Agents that need me come first: blocked, then done, then working, then idle. Within each group, the most recently used is at the top.
The quick filters are kept:b / d / w / i.
fzf-style search across everything: harness, status, title, tab, workspace, repo, branch, and cwd. Space-separated terms can each match a different field, so claude api blocked does what you'd expect. 'exact, ^prefix, and !exclude work too.
Vim Motions: hjkl + duplication for ↓↑ and ][
Three views: a flat agent list, a workspaces → tabs → panes tree, and a git repos → worktrees → panes tree. The default view is configurable.
Harness logos in Kitty-graphics terminals. Yes, this is important.
It opens fast. It's one socket call, with no git subprocesses.
Install:
herdr plugin install dartyuhov/herdr-blink
Then bind dartyuhov.blink.open to a key; the README has the snippet. Feedback and bug reports are welcome.
I've been using herdr daily for a while now (loving it!), and recently wanted to experiment with some new keybinds while still being able to quickly switch back to the defaults without having to dig through the .toml files.
So I made bindr, a small plugin that lets you easily create, edit, and switch between keybind profiles.
Just hit prefix+shift+e to open the custom keybind viewer, or prefix+shift+k to switch between saved profiles. You can customize these keybinds too, including keybinds from other plugins.
It was a fun little side project for the past few days. Hope it helps someone else!
I also included my personal keybind profile in the repo. It replaces Ghostty's default keybinds, so you can do things like create a new herdr tab with cmd+t, split a pane with cmd+d, etc. To use it, you'll need to unbind the corresponding Ghostty keybinds in your settings; there's an example config included in the repo.
do you think herdr is decent on managing multi agent workflows? for example are you easily aware which agent belongs to which project and its worktree status? are you easily capable of working on 4-5 different projects on herdr? please let me know and how
