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One Terminal to Watch Them All: Inside herdr, the Open Source Multiplexer Built for the Agent Era
Running a single AI coding agent inside a single terminal window is a manageable, almost pleasant experience. Running ten of them at once, spread across different repositories, each moving at its own pace, quickly turns into something closer to air traffic control without a radar screen. One agent finished its task fifteen minutes ago and has been sitting idle ever since. Another is stuck waiting on a question nobody noticed. A third is still grinding through a long running task in a pane that scrolled out of view an hour ago.
An open source project called herdr was built specifically to solve this exact problem, giving every coding agent its own real terminal while surfacing the state of the entire fleet at a single glance, all from one lightweight binary rather than a heavyweight desktop application.
The Problem That Emerges Once Agents Multiply
A single terminal window scales perfectly well for a single task. The trouble starts the moment parallel agentic work becomes routine rather than exceptional, which is increasingly the normal way many developers now operate. Coding agents frequently need to wait for a decision, hit a permission prompt, or simply pause mid task waiting on some external…
