Hi! I’m Nathan: an ML Engineer at Mozilla.ai: I built agent-of-empires (aoe): a CLI application to help you manage all of your running Claude Code/Opencode sessions and know when they are waiting for you.

- Written in rust and relies on tmux for security and reliability - Monitors state of cli sessions to tell you when an agent is running vs idle vs waiting for your input - Manage sessions by naming them, grouping them, configuring profiles for various settings

I'm passionate about getting self-hosted open-weight LLMs to be valid options to compete with proprietary closed models. One roadblock for me is that although tools like opencode allow you to connect to Local LLMs (Ollama, lm studio, etc), they generally run muuuuuch slower than models hosted by Anthropic and OpenAI. I would start a coding agent on a task, but then while I was sitting waiting for that task to complete, I would start opening new terminal windows to start multitasking. Pretty soon, I was spending a lot of time toggling between terminal windows to see which one needed me: like help in adding a clarification, approving a new command, or giving it a new task.

That’s why I build agent-of-empires (“aoe”). With aoe, I can launch a bunch of opencode and Claude Code sessions and quickly see their status or toggle between them, which helps me avoid having a lot of terminal windows open, or having to manually attach and detach from tmux sessions myself. It’s helping me give local LLMs a fair try, because them being slower is now much less of a bottleneck.

You can give it an install with

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/njbrake/agent-of-empires/m... | bash

Or brew install njbrake/aoe/aoe

And then launch by simply entering the command `aoe`.

I’m interested in what you think as well as what features you think would be useful to add!

I am planning to add some further features around sandboxing (with docker) as well as support for intuitive git worktrees and am curious if there are any opinions about what should or shouldn’t be in it.

I decided against MCP management or generic terminal usage, to help keep the tool focused on parts of agentic coding that I haven’t found a usable solution for.

I hit the character limit on this post which prevented me from including a view of the output, but the readme on the github link has a screenshot showing what it looks like.

Thanks!

For the sake of convenience we found ourselves in a tedious terrible place again and now we have to scrape to get out of it

If only we could have a clean API to programmatically control agents... The best UI is no UI

I am seeing a lot of development working around the shitty experience that is being stuck in a terribly slow cli program, nothing against this particular project

This looks cool, I’ll definitely try it out.

The best (for me) of these that I’ve tried so far is conductor.build

They have a different UI orientation, and it’s more locked into Claude code, but it might be good inspiration for your future plans. They get the git worktree setup and teardown and managing dev servers part of it right IMO.

Does it have a . Hotkey for automatically switching to the next idle worker, like the namesake did?

Agent orchestration seems to be the new hot problem to be solved in the ecosystem. See also Steve Yegge's most recent posts [1]. Curious to see what tools emerge as the winners of the Cambrian explosion we're probably about to see.

[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-future-of-coding-agents-e...

I'm setting up a small orchestration around zellij (I have almost no experience with tmux, so I went with the "modern" alternative), upterm and qrencode that allows me to 1) generate a claude code instance in a persistent session 2) make it controllable remotely via upterm 3) scan a qr code to copy the upterm server's ssh url on my phone so that I can paste it in termux.

I wonder if it would be more ergonomic to connect to the aoe window on my phone for when I have more then one claude code session to keep track of. I'm not against switching the zellij part to tmux.

how is this different than using tmux? i don't understand what it does

>relies on tmux for security how is it more secure than not using it?

I'm always curious how folks do status detection. Here you use tmux capture-pane and detect off that! Whew! Simple & direct!

I've been really enjoying how OpenCode is so extensible, how you can make great plugins that can for example read the session.idle event & then go do whatever they want. That does require dropping in some config asking for the plugin, which takes some effort & requires a restart (but your session will be right there & you can continue). It's technically elegant imo, and nice that there is the extensibility.

But hard to beat using screen as a framebuffer & just reading it out, for doing absolutely whatever it is you could possibly want to do! For example you can also detect permissions prompts, which I don't believe there is an event for!