Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#11

Post by [deleted] »

widenrun wrote: post #10
nojs wrote: post #7

This looks very useful. I would love something similar that lets me plug in actual Claude Code/Codex with their original agent loop, prompting etc, and just handles the multiplexing, worktrees, isolation, etc automatically (it looks like this tool doesn’t support that). Because I think a lot of the power of eg CC comes from the engineering they’ve done to the tool rather than the underlying model. How are people doin…

I'm using conductor.build and running both Claude Code and Codex. It's taken 95% of my workflow and I'm loving it (I'm not affiliated with them at all, genuinely enjoying it and hoping it succeed)

[deleted]

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#12

Post by _pdp_ »

ttoinou wrote: post #2

Something I never see mention is that all agents / CLI tools seem to modify local files. Which makes editing current files, working with the git, asking to only modify some parts of the files etc. cumbersome, as the agent is constantly reading and writing to files that we are also accessing. This is usually solved by using git worktree but this solution requires 1 new folder name and branch for each new agent, and ea…

Given that all of these agents are written in javascript I have always wondered why they cannot simply use https://isomorphic-git.org/ and do everything in memory.

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#13

Post by scottmf »

widenrun wrote: post #10
nojs wrote: post #7

This looks very useful. I would love something similar that lets me plug in actual Claude Code/Codex with their original agent loop, prompting etc, and just handles the multiplexing, worktrees, isolation, etc automatically (it looks like this tool doesn’t support that). Because I think a lot of the power of eg CC comes from the engineering they’ve done to the tool rather than the underlying model. How are people doin…

I'm using conductor.build and running both Claude Code and Codex. It's taken 95% of my workflow and I'm loving it (I'm not affiliated with them at all, genuinely enjoying it and hoping it succeed)

Same here. Codex support is a recent addition however, and it’s not clear if MCP servers and other rules apply to Codex. Also it would be nice to be able to just have a session working on the main branch as concurrent work in worktrees can get messy

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#14

Post by chrisweekly »

ttoinou wrote: post #4
IanCal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point. Docker? I typically want other kinds of isolation for services and things anyway - it’s got its own file system, you could have N versions on the same branch working without conflict (at least the conflict you’d have with work trees). There is some more plumbing involved but…not much? Edit - task boards are my first thought for the comms side for agents sharing info.

Docker is very heavy and more for Linux, I'm on macOS and Windows for desktop software development and can't put my software to test inside Docker. But yeah I could have sandboxes inside macOS and inside Windows (virtualization, VMs, WSL etc.), I'd still need one main orchestrating agent + GUI to rule them all

Not 100% sure it will solve your complaints about Docker, but https://OrbStack.com makes working w/ docker, docker-compose, linux vms, and k8s so much better.

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#15

Post by Coolin96 »

nojs wrote: post #7

This looks very useful. I would love something similar that lets me plug in actual Claude Code/Codex with their original agent loop, prompting etc, and just handles the multiplexing, worktrees, isolation, etc automatically (it looks like this tool doesn’t support that). Because I think a lot of the power of eg CC comes from the engineering they’ve done to the tool rather than the underlying model. How are people doin…

I’ve been using (and loving) https://github.com/raine/workmux which brings together tmux, git worktrees, and CLI agents into an opinionated workflow.

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#17

Post by CuriouslyC »

nojs wrote: post #7

This looks very useful. I would love something similar that lets me plug in actual Claude Code/Codex with their original agent loop, prompting etc, and just handles the multiplexing, worktrees, isolation, etc automatically (it looks like this tool doesn’t support that). Because I think a lot of the power of eg CC comes from the engineering they’ve done to the tool rather than the underlying model. How are people doin…

Since CC is a terminal app you can spin up a container with your project, dependencies and CC already installed easily via docker, then just ssh in and run claude remotely. Tmux if desired. Save work by doing pull requests.

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#18

Post by CuriouslyC »

widenrun wrote: post #10
nojs wrote: post #7

This looks very useful. I would love something similar that lets me plug in actual Claude Code/Codex with their original agent loop, prompting etc, and just handles the multiplexing, worktrees, isolation, etc automatically (it looks like this tool doesn’t support that). Because I think a lot of the power of eg CC comes from the engineering they’ve done to the tool rather than the underlying model. How are people doin…

I'm using conductor.build and running both Claude Code and Codex. It's taken 95% of my workflow and I'm loving it (I'm not affiliated with them at all, genuinely enjoying it and hoping it succeed)

Amazing to me all these apps duplicating well tuned Github functionality.

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#19

Post by jadbox »

Coolin96 wrote: post #15
nojs wrote: post #7

This looks very useful. I would love something similar that lets me plug in actual Claude Code/Codex with their original agent loop, prompting etc, and just handles the multiplexing, worktrees, isolation, etc automatically (it looks like this tool doesn’t support that). Because I think a lot of the power of eg CC comes from the engineering they’ve done to the tool rather than the underlying model. How are people doin…

I’ve been using (and loving) https://github.com/raine/workmux which brings together tmux, git worktrees, and CLI agents into an opinionated workflow.

Oh this looks perfect. This feels like the Linux way to keep tools separated to their primary function. I don't want my MUX tool to do AI stuff, as I have other (better) tools meant for that.

Re: A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development

#20

Post by shunia_huang »

ttoinou wrote: post #2

Something I never see mention is that all agents / CLI tools seem to modify local files. Which makes editing current files, working with the git, asking to only modify some parts of the files etc. cumbersome, as the agent is constantly reading and writing to files that we are also accessing. This is usually solved by using git worktree but this solution requires 1 new folder name and branch for each new agent, and ea…

So true when I'm running multiple agents in one project with multiple terminal windows. For example, with one working on implementing tests and another working on features, the feature agents will complain that the tests are not working and need fixing, while the test agent(s) will report outdated test coverage results due to newly introduced files.

It's annoying and hilarious at the same time.

Post reply on HN