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