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Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

herdr.dev

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Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#71

Post by rvz »

hx8 wrote: post #16
rvz wrote: post #10

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 an…

I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do t…

> I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free.

This software was "free" (as in libre) and costed $0 and until now, it was licensed under AGPL 3. But contrary to one common misbelief in open source and free software, the maintenance is not free at all.

> The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that.

In the case of this project which took off, why would you expect the maintainer to work on the project for free?

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#74

Post by giodamelio »

ahmadyan wrote: post #52

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 Superlogica…

It's super important to me. I use Herdr every day and I maintain a whole stack of changes. From minor comfort tweaks that are just preference, to several larger changes like add jj workspace support and a WIP web based view (powered by xterm.js).

This is not the only project like this too. Many of my devtools are piling up changes. I try to upstream changes where it makes sense, but many times they are either very bespoke, or I can't be bothered to do them "right" (for example for the jj workspace change, I just ripped out git support, so I didn't have to futz with syncing the symantics up between the two and config and whatnot).

LLMs have made making personal changes to devtools so effortless that I am now extremely hesitant to use any non source available software at all.

I have been thinking about a possibly expanded market for source available software. I don't really care what the license of the software is, I'm not sharing it at all or using it commercially, so it's kinda a moot point. If someone made some amazing software and sold the source I'd definitely consider it. I know there are all sorts of practical business problems with that, but that aside I'm curious if others feel the same?

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#75

Post by foltik »

ahmadyan wrote: post #52

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 Superlogica…

I avoid closed source software because it’s often a pain to use on Linux.

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#76

Post by lonesword »

Congratulations! I came across herdr a few weeks ago and I've been daily driving it ever since. I've tried a few other tools like Emdash and Superset but Herdr is the only one that did a decent job rendering Claude code UI and didn't randomly crash and could run on a remote server.

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#77

Post by haykot »

humblepie wrote: post #5

Okay, back to tmux it is then.

I built hive that’s similar to herdr but sits beside tmux instead. It provides a nice status UI on top of tmux instead of building the multiplexer. It also has a bunch of other utilities for working with agents like a message bus and task management framework.

https://github.com/colonyops/hive

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#79

Post by miki123211 »

ahmadyan wrote: post #52

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 Superlogica…

In practice, I suspect the entire category will be folded into Claude Code and Codex (Anthropic is already trying with Claude Agents), and that will do 80% of the job at 0% of the cost and configuration effort.

External programs will still be useful for the tiny minority who wants different harnesses for different projects, but yeah, tiny minority.

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#80

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

ahmadyan wrote: post #52

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 Superlogica…

In the case of my WIP Agent IDE, OSS is mandatory because the tool needs to be able to read its own source to improve itself.
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