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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

#91

Post by ahmadyan »

giodamelio wrote: post #74
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 be…

i see your point, in that light what herdr is doing here make sense. keep some part open (e.g. runtime or whatever that means, or the front-end, or the user-facing logic, etc) and move the business-logic/etc to proprietary. So you get to customize the software to meet your needs, and at the same time to create some revenue incentive to grow the company.

alternative is to collect/sell usage data, which is icky, or provide something as a service (token usage, infra, plugins, etc)

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

#92

Post by mbreese »

tlamponi wrote: post #89
tyre wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle. If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to sti…

> if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it No, it isn't; a client talking to an AGPLv3 service over a network API stays a separate program and is not touched by the license at all. Section 13 places obligations solely on whoever runs a modified version of the service, while remote users, API clients included, only gain the right to receive that service's source. So nothing on the…

You may think this. I may think this. But what really matters is if the lawyers for your customers think this. It may be pure FUD, but AGPL projects have a tough time getting adoption in companies because they would rather avoid the problem than be wrong.

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

#93

Post by calvinmorrison »

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…

frankly with the level of complexity of IDEs, I just need a working product. In my mind it is closer to "photoshop" now than vim. I would probably pay for VSCode. I can't believe its free.

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

#94

Post by ahmadyan »

miki123211 wrote: post #79
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.

in my experience, tools usually have a longer shelf-life than models/labs. e.g. terminals and IDEs have been around for much longer, and people tend to stick around with their preferred IDEs for much longer (years/decades).

One bad cycle and the next Opus 6 or GPT 7 might flop (think what happend to LLama4 or Gemini), and the user quickly switch to the next best thing. So it make sense to build your tooling to be model-agnostic.

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

#95

Post by ahmadyan »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #93
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…

frankly with the level of complexity of IDEs, I just need a working product. In my mind it is closer to "photoshop" now than vim. I would probably pay for VSCode. I can't believe its free.

well, visual studio isn't free. Code is free, and at some point it got so good that folks didn't feel the need to pay for the main suite.

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

#96

Post by calvinmorrison »

ahmadyan wrote: post #95
calvinmorrison wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

frankly with the level of complexity of IDEs, I just need a working product. In my mind it is closer to "photoshop" now than vim. I would probably pay for VSCode. I can't believe its free.

well, visual studio isn't free. Code is free, and at some point it got so good that folks didn't feel the need to pay for the main suite.

well thats on point for microsoft branding

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

#97

Post by Taek »

This title is killing me. "The runtime stays open" is such a heavy, attention grabbing sentence, it's all I can stare at on the front page. It's the type of writing that makes me hate working with LLMs, because it's so powerful at monopolizing my attention, and makes it difficult for me to focus on any of the other words on the page (whether the front page, or the comments page).

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

#99

Post by waterproof »

mbreese wrote: post #92
tlamponi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it No, it isn't; a client talking to an AGPLv3 service over a network API stays a separate program and is not touched by the license at all. Section 13 places obligations solely on whoever runs a modified version of the service, while remote users, API clients included, only gain the right to receive that service's source. So nothing on the…

You may think this. I may think this. But what really matters is if the lawyers for your customers think this. It may be pure FUD, but AGPL projects have a tough time getting adoption in companies because they would rather avoid the problem than be wrong.

This is true, unfortunately. I've have had to walk away from a client because their software-illiterate lawyer didn't want me to build with copyleft dependencies.

It wasn't the only red flag in this case, but frustrating nonetheless.

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