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

> 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.

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.

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.

I am guessing this now directly competes with mitchellh's multiplexer / Superlogical.

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.

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.)

wtf is "runtime"

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.

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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

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.