There seem to be a lot of these sorts of tools popping up but it’s not clear to me the added value they bring in over using plain tmux (or any other “normal” session multiplexer).

Can someone who uses one of these agent-specific multiplexers share their experience and reasoning for reaching for / building these? What makes this better than a normal multiplexer? I am asking in earnest; I just don’t understand but I want to.

I've tested out just about every tool like this, and ended up coding my own, it is really minimal though.

The primary reason people reach for these tools are two to three reasons:

1. Tmux does not natively show agent statuses of agents / notify you when one needs input. Helpful when you have a huge list of small things to fix: I just spin up N agents in parallel to handle all of them, then I go over and review.

2. Tmux does not handle worktree handling. If you wanna make changes in parallel you cannot have two agents make db migrations at the same time. The way to solve for this is to have them work on two different worktrees with separate environments, ports etc.

3. Tmux tree view is not super beautiful, especially for viewing agents.

I built this as a tmux plugin since I don't really want to opt-out of tmux as a whole, especially since I like my keybindings there.

https://github.com/Ymirke/tmux-agent-switcher

I’ve been using herdr lately and before that I was using zellij and before that tmux and before that gnu screen

For me the main advantage of herdr is that when I have the codex integration activated, herdr will keep track of the codex session ids and automatically restore them after restart

With the other multiplexers I had to create a separate tool that would save/restore layout/tabs/panes/session ids. And I had to run it manually. With herdr it just works, almost out of the box

Oh, it’s also very nice that you can create groups of tabs, so it’s easier to organize if you have more than 3-4 terminal sessions open (I usually keep at least 3 tabs, each split into an agent pane and a zsh pane)

And lastly, mouse scroll support is a lot better. I’ve had many issues with scrolling codex’s output. tmux and zellij’s scrolling wouldn’t play nicely with codex’s output, but herdr seems to work very well

I've been using herdr for a couple of weeks. The only real advantage is that it makes the agent status glanceable in the sidebar, which can be nice if you don't want to cycle through your tmux panes to check if something's blocked or complete. Other than that, it's kind of just tmux (which is nice, I like tmux).

- I get OS level notifications when the agent is ready.

- I don't need to use TMUX's wonky keyboard shortcuts

- I moved off of TMUX anyway, when ssh-ing into remote servers became 'not a thing'

- automatic coding session management, like auto resume, layout manamgement, etc. out of the box, without setting up TMUX, which could be a wormhole for some, by the time you fix mouse scrolling, cut/paste, etc...

I'm currently using CMUX, and been pretty happy with it it at this time, but loving the evolution of all these tools

https://bower.sh/you-might-not-need-tmux

I built yoloAI, which is a sandboxer so it uses tmux to keep the agent alive inside. Since I can just reattach to them or use VS code tunnels, I don't really have a need for a multiplexer, though.

My main reason for herdr over tmux is the priority queue of agents requiring intervention.

Most of the AI tools people are building have little to zero value.

If you're making valuable tools, anthropic, openai, or one of the other big players in the space will hire you/buy you out and then they will release the tool themselves.

I'm getting really tired of everyone doing their own special rain dances and then acting like they made it rain.

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