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Show HN: Offrun – manage every coding agent from one workspace

76 points · 64 comments · arunbhatia

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petesergeant · 1791026955 · focus · HN ↗
The obvious question -- which you should spend time answering -- is what does this give that Herdr doesn't have? What's the differentiator?
1. zaphirplane · 1791030410 · focus · HN ↗
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  1. petesergeant · 1791033401 · focus · HN ↗
    My mental model (and I don't really use it) is it's agent-aware tmux.
  2. user43928 · 1791037591 · focus · HN ↗
    It looks like crap.
    Why would I want the terminal coding agents inside of a GUI app? The idea is terrible.
    The first point in the explanations below makes no sense, claiming my agents will "keep working" if I close my notebook's lid or disconnect the network.
    This is obviously not the case.
    smokeydoe · 1791044504 · focus · HN ↗
    Some people like to run their agents on different headless servers. Herdr is cool because you can connect via ssh and use herdr on that machine from anywhere. When you close the client or disconnect, herdr is still running on the host.
    > Why would I want the terminal coding agents inside of a GUI app?
    Because they get difficult to manage with enough of them and multiple projects. The GUI helps them stay organized, especially with multiple harnesses. Herdr is a minimal GUI, and works like a simple tmux, which is why I like it.
2. arunbhatia · 1791055626 · focus · HN ↗
  Herdr lets you run agents anywhere, and Offrun helps you to manage the agents. We are going to launch Herdr integration inside Offrun soon.
hn3ufz62f7 · 1791029174 · focus · HN ↗
Thing I'd want surfaced is per account rate limit headroom before I dispatch, not after I'm stuck mid task.
1. keel_dev · 1791044444 · focus · HN ↗
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2. arunbhatia · 1791055936 · focus · HN ↗
  The whole point of Offrun is that we want the users to stay in a flow state. Users will never be stuck because of session/account limits because they can simply switch to any other account in 1-click and resume the work seamlessly.
SyneRyder · 1791030665 · focus · HN ↗
Huh. I just got pitched something like this earlier this week by an agent as well.
I'm not the target market for this, but this one has the same limitation as the one that pitched me: Mac Silicon only. No Linux, no Windows, no Intel Mac either.
Sibling comment mentioned Herdr, and Herdr is on all those platforms and apparently has raised $6 Mil.
The other catch for all of these: do you integrate with my custom harness? What do you offer that I can't vibe code myself?
1. psanchez · 1791037747 · focus · HN ↗
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2. arunbhatia · 1791056210 · focus · HN ↗
  great point! we have released only for Mac for now (both silicon and Intel) and will be launching Windows and Linux versions soon.
  We are going to integrate Herdr, Pi, Opencode and provision to add custom harness soon - already working in that direction.
  Yes, one can always build this on their own. We are just building based on our observations on what is missing while using claude, codex, Pi, Opencode etc.
handfuloflight · 1791031552 · focus · HN ↗
Why does "and what every account has left." activate the "written by LLM" part of my brain?
1. fxwin · 1791033393 · focus · HN ↗
  It occupies the same space in my brain as the clickbait-type "This is the key" and "what you're missing" LLM-isms
2. cprecioso · 1791033474 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
3. futhey · 1791035826 · focus · HN ↗
  Because every bit of this webpage was written by Claude.
4. arunbhatia · 1791055735 · focus · HN ↗
  because it was written by an LLM - using the direction given by a fellow human :)
  thats the future we are heading to, right?
mr-karan · 1791032838 · focus · HN ↗
How's this different to <a href="https://paseo.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://paseo.sh/ or <a href="https://www.onorca.dev/">https://www.onorca.dev/ which seems to be more feature complete? I personally use and like Paseo. I get to connect to my LLM agents even on other machines, remotely via Tailscale and the mobile app UX is quite good.
1. arunbhatia · 1791101268 · focus · HN ↗
  The fundamental difference is in the design philosophy - other meta harnesses focus on agent-in-the-loop, and we focus on the other half, i.e human-in-the-loop. We will be feature-complete in the next 2 months - launching the cloud and offrun mobile app soon.
imaginer8 · 1791033690 · focus · HN ↗
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haroldopina · 1791036380 · focus · HN ↗
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OmerKaraaslan · 1791036940 · focus · HN ↗
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maxloh · 1791037689 · focus · HN ↗
We already have similar products, like Goose [0], Paseo [1], and T3 Code [2].
[0]: <a href="https://goose.ai" rel="nofollow">https://goose.ai
[1]:<a href="https://paseo.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://paseo.sh/
[2]: <a href="https://t3.codes/" rel="nofollow">https://t3.codes/
1. mococa · 1791043248 · focus · HN ↗
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2. KronisLV · 1791043490 · focus · HN ↗
  Add these to the list:
  [3] <a href="https://orchestrator.inc/" rel="nofollow">https://orchestrator.inc/
  [4] <a href="https://gitkraken.com/kepler" rel="nofollow">https://gitkraken.com/kepler
  [5] <a href="https://emdash.com/">https://emdash.com/
  [6] <a href="https://superset.sh/">https://superset.sh/
  [7] <a href="https://www.conductor.build/">https://www.conductor.build/
  [8] <a href="https://nimbalyst.com/" rel="nofollow">https://nimbalyst.com/
  [9] <a href="https://parallelcode.app/" rel="nofollow">https://parallelcode.app/
  [10] <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/air/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jetbrains.com/air/
  There's also sometimes options that try to have a tighter integration with a single harness, which honestly seems to be better cause ACP is fairly bare:
  [11] <a href="https://openchamber.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://openchamber.dev/
  Personally, I found Paseo to be very pleasant, except sometimes I had sub-agents kinda hang.
  Kepler had a really nice issue tracking integration (GitLab/GitHub Issues, Trello, Linear, Jira) but their UI felt like vibe coded slop, like the core experience doesn't feel very good, but they keep adding shit that nobody needs like a graph visualization of what the agents are doing, instead of letting me drag the tasks around the Kanban board myself or tell the agents how to do that and how to transition the issue statuses. Hopefully it's gonna get better within a few years, still early on in development. Still, the idea of an issue tracker integration is brilliant and all harnesses should consider supporting that, e.g. pick which tickets you want to work on, they automatically create worktrees and agents do the planning/research step, presenting you with plans like /grill-me so you can decide what to work on, alongside having a step for merging all of those worktrees whenever you want when a wave of work is done.
  I haven't tried most of them tbh cause my OS install doesn't need to be even more of a dumpster, but I'm surprised at how none of these really seem all that... rock solid?
  Like if I open a JetBrains IDE like IntelliJ IDEA / Rider I know that despite the crappy resource usage and whatnot, they have the needs of writing, refactoring, debugging and building code covered. Most of the current harnesses seem to get some baseline of telling agents what to do, but still somehow end up being buggy (e.g. can't peek into OpenCode sub-agents and give THEM instructions last I checked, or pause or alter the prompt, despite Claude Code allowing message exchanges with sub-agents and such), and many others are just clones of what already exists.
  At the same time the desktop / web apps shipped with harnesses like OpenCode (if there's one at all) are very clearly insufficient and a step below Claude Code Desktop and Codex (ChatGPT app) in usability (like that move to horizontal tabs like browsers have, come on how am I supposed to navigate when there's like 30 of those? or what about an auto mode switch within the UI), so obviously we do need something as an ADE.
  Personally I wonder if half of these projects will die off in like 5 years, or whether they'll get more polish or differentiate themselves more, and which will try to push more for cloud-only stuff, like how RooCode essentially dumped their VSC plugins and went all in on the cloud.
  1. vehemenz · 1791043821 · focus · HN ↗
    My macOS is a dumpster, so I can tell you that all these products do slightly different things. It’s apples and oranges across the board.
    Except instead of just apples and oranges, there are several dozen fruits involved, and it takes a month to fully taste and digest any of them enough to decide whether they’re worth eating. And by then, there might be an improved cultivar of one of the fruits you tried before but decided wasn’t good enough.
  2. tash_2s · 1791044622 · focus · HN ↗
    And tmux with a good config and scripts.
3. cjr · 1791051549 · focus · HN ↗
  And <a href="https://openrig.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://openrig.dev/
epistasis · 1791040482 · focus · HN ↗
Love these threads for sharing experience. Using Orca has been a game changer (which I found and started using because I saw somebody using Conductor)
These sorts of management tools really speed up development by automating all the PR management, such as making new worktrees, etc. and then super speed up the multitasking between different parallel feature development.
Excited to see if this one works better for me, and to try all the new alternatives in these comments.
1. samudrijan · 1791041706 · focus · HN ↗
  I totally keep my agents away from git writes.
  1. epistasis · 1791045645 · focus · HN ↗
    Me too! If I don't gate on the git commits it's too hard to catch the code and algorithmic errors.
    Had to add some pretty severe restrictions for the disaster Claude 5 line to get it to follow directions on that (ended up cancelling my sub over that sort of behavior, and the bad use of human language)
  2. haukebri · 1791051455 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
jatins · 1791040657 · focus · HN ↗
Congrats on this ship, it's hard to get anything out there!
However, as many other comments have mentioned -- how do you plan to get users in a crowded space?
1. arunbhatia · 1791055238 · focus · HN ↗
  haha thanks for the positive comment - we are working on the right design to get users! Our early users are appreciating the intuitive design of the tool - our focus is to manage multiple coding agents without getting human attention in the way.
hmokiguess · 1791042914 · focus · HN ↗
I still believe this space to be unclaimed, and I am yet to see who's going to crack the demand and needs of the niches out there.
I don't think we even have a great understanding of the market, the niches, and where it is going.
It's also evolving very aggressively constantly, sticky workflows get replaced dramatically whenever new UX or tooling brings a shift into how things can be done.
I'm very curious if anyone has good research or idea of this space mapped out somewhere, I am trying to build for it too but it's really foggy right now and the North Star moves often.
1. ithkuil · 1791055416 · focus · HN ↗
  I tried a few of those and they are shiny but each eventually has their own bugs and quirks and limitations and I always felt like I was trying too much of my active workflow into a tool that could crash and lose all me sessions.
  Whenever I need to change or fix ccwt I just spawn an agent with a fix and then I merge and rebuild the tool and it automatically autoupdates and restarts in the herdr tabs. This way I don't have to replace the "outer shell" of my agents for every change I make. Only when herdr itself gets reinstalled (often herdr can reattach to the same sessions but sometimes you just need to stop everything and restart all the agents. Losing progress notification state in the process)
  I found a more modular approach that works for me:
  1. Herdr terminal multiplexer 2. My custom orchestrator, which I grew out organically based on what I actually need and I feel I can easily change. It started like a minimal reimplementation of wt (worktrunk) but grew out into an integrated constellation of TUIs that leverage herdr API to drive herdr and help me navigate in herdr
  Just sharing as an example of the pattern. It's not meant to be an useable tool by anybody else I think.
  <a href="https://github.com/mkmik/acmik" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mkmik/acmik
adreamcali · 1791043086 · focus · HN ↗
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manume · 1791044955 · focus · HN ↗
I built a website that compares 68 of these tools: <a href="https://agentmgmt.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://agentmgmt.dev/
Offrun is added.
1. nezhar · 1791046816 · focus · HN ↗
  Nice, would <a href="https://vibepod.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://vibepod.dev/ also be a fit for the list?
  1. mbil · 1791048734 · focus · HN ↗
    Also maybe <a href="https://omnigent.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://omnigent.ai/
    manume · 1791050297 · focus · HN ↗
    Added, thanks!
  2. manume · 1791050519 · focus · HN ↗
    It seems more for isolating agents, not orchestrating them AFAICS.
    nezhar · 1791055521 · focus · HN ↗
    There is a Task mode availalbe: <a href="https://vibepod.dev/docs/agents/#managing-tasks" rel="nofollow">https://vibepod.dev/docs/agents/#managing-tasks
    Workers and Boards are in the making
2. leowoo91 · 1791047297 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. manume · 1791052006 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, to be honest I'm looking for ways to make the list more useful, but it's not that easy.
    I'd love a way to track "popularity", but only 64% of the tools are on Github, so we can track their star counts, and less than half are installed via Homebrew or npm, which could let us track their install numbers.
    Another option would be to let users say which tool(s) they use and calculate popularity based on that, but probably some tool authors would tell their community to go and vote for them and the result would be a ranking by which community is most engaged...
    Open to ideas! :)
3. Garlef · 1791048731 · focus · HN ↗
  openrig also seems to fit
  1. manume · 1791050547 · focus · HN ↗
    Added, thanks!
4. pants2 · 1791051690 · focus · HN ↗
  Soon we're going to need a meta-orchestrator for all these agent orchestrators
5. alasano · 1791052678 · focus · HN ↗
  Did you build this out of pure interest in what's available or to be able to chime on threads like these on Reddit and HN when someone builds the same thing once again?
  1. manume · 1791053178 · focus · HN ↗
    Haha good question, mostly for myself tbh. There's a "Who built this?" section at the bottom:
    "I built this site for two reasons:
    I think agent management tools will be an important category with a lot of innovation over the next few years. I keep finding new tools and then quickly forgetting their names, so I needed a place to keep track of them."
6. kingforaday · 1791053825 · focus · HN ↗
  Nice site and I'm surprised (also not surprised) by how many there are. A few missing that you might consider adding:
  - paperclip
  - multica
  - perplexity computer
  1. arunbhatia · 1791054669 · focus · HN ↗
    thanks for highlighting - added to the roadmap
  2. manume · 1791055275 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks! Those three are not really coding agents though.
7. arunbhatia · 1791054641 · focus · HN ↗
  hey, thanks
  1. manume · 1791055093 · focus · HN ↗
    My pleasure. What would you say differentiates (or will differentiate) Offrun from the others?
    arunbhatia · 1791056512 · focus · HN ↗
    we are focusing on human attention - managing multiple agents leads to approval fatigue and human-in-the-loop design goes for a toss. We are making sure that agentic engineers are focused on building the right product without worrying about assembling tools to build the right product.
    On a lighter note - our biggest differentiator(which my CTO won't agree with) is that we have an in-built radio in the product that the user can listen to while agents are running.
    manume · 1791057480 · focus · HN ↗
    The radio is a good idea. :) I saw something today where you automatically join a live multiplayer Doom game when the agent starts working...
8. SeriousM · 1791058603 · focus · HN ↗
  well done! but "compare" is a bit of a stretch... maybe you can get an inspiration from models.dev ?
  1. manume · 1791061316 · focus · HN ↗
    Why a bit of a stretch? They are compared on four aspects (platforms, price, GH stars, open-source). Any more I can add?
    SeriousM · 1791073596 · focus · HN ↗
    Glad you ask and I respect that.
    Here are the things I would love to see: - supported tooling (e.g. built in browser) - interaction type ( chat ui, terminal, booth) - context size added (how large is the additional context so that the agent knows the ADE) - extensibility (plugins possible) - completely free, paid possible - range of harness support (some only support claude and codex) - installation type (own server + n clients, only clients and properitary server) - connectivity support of multiple machines (tailscale, SSH, wireguard, proprietary) - age of project, commit count, PR count - multiselect of possible platforms (e.g. windows + android)
    I guess that's all that is broadly comparable without going into too much detail.
    Thanks for your interest!
    SeriousM · 1791099176 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh and one last one: is the client headless possible or is a GUI necessary.
9. nitin7 · 1791079318 · focus · HN ↗
  This is nice and handy, thank you. Do you plan to add filters?
  1. manume · 1791152863 · focus · HN ↗
    There's a filter by platform already. You can sort by any of the columns, so I'm not sure if more filters are really necessary right now.
eranation · 1791045225 · focus · HN ↗
I think every single one of us who use more than one agent locally has built something like this. There is definitely a need, and appreciate it being 100% free, but eventually, something needs to be so good and with so much community best practices in it, that it will beat a DIY one. E.g. I usually use Claude Opus 5.5 as the "driver" and let it spin cursor, codex, other claude subagents at will for different tasks (this way it always know what is running where). Simply asking it to break down the backlog into a DAG, show which one needs my input, which one is blocked, publish an HTML page and keep it up to date (and sinked with the built in TODO list) is usually all it takes.
I would go as far as making this a skill perhaps, so I can get the same results on other projects... but not sure what is the benefit of making it a Mac only binary, it can be a simple HTML / jsx, with maybe hooks or a /loop to keep it up to date.
A solution needs to be really better than what I can ask Claude to build in 20 minutes. It's not the "someone else spent time and thought and tokens so you don't have to" which does have some value, it's knowing that whatever I try, it will be a little different from what I want, and the energy to fork it, tweak it, is too high vs just asking Claude to build it for me on the spot...
tl;dr Definitely cool, definitely needed, but the bar for everything (including free and open source) has gone extremely high. Things that would become beloved de-facto "industry standard" tools a la "oh are you still using X everyone is using Y" just a few years ago, are now shrugged as a vibe coded lunchtime project (the new weekend project)
It's impossible to impress anyone anymore. I feel dead inside. We all got accepted to hogwarts and we became desensitized to having magic powers.
1. arunbhatia · 1791055395 · focus · HN ↗
  haha really appreciate your comment - I have taken your feedback and will definitely add the thought process to our roadmap.
antonyragleap · 1791048855 · focus · HN ↗
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mbil · 1791049283 · focus · HN ↗
All of the handful of tools in this space that I've tried have modeled an overlap/coupling between project, directory, and machine. For my workloads specifically I think these should be organized differently. Something like top-level projects that have child task/goal/sessions with each one fanning out to different agents running potentially in different worktrees, directories, and even on different machines. E.g. I have a lot of notes and other context stored locally. On a different machine I have repositories checked out and build tooling installed. Frontend and backend exist in different directories but can both be relevant to a given unit of delivery. Are there any agent orchestrators that can model things that way?
1. arunbhatia · 1791054932 · focus · HN ↗
  we are somewhat already heading in this direction to handle complex workflows like yours
phildenhoff · 1791049940 · focus · HN ↗
One thing about these tools - and, as discussed, there are many - that they mostly seem to share is that they all show coding agents work as a transcript of a conversation.
Why?
The underlying conversation has nothing to do with the work. That there is one context window is an implementation detail.
I've built one of these for myself, and instead it shares questions, plans, findings, assumptions as distinct UI elements. The conversation is hidden: your focus is on "what's next".
Are there other meta-harnesses doing the same thing? I'd love to stop building my own and use a product someone else has already built!
1. alasano · 1791052952 · focus · HN ↗
  Why not keep building yours? It will quite literally be the same or better than 99% of these tools.
  I also don't care much about individual conversations with agents as the main way of managing work, my personal dashboard shows projects (and subdivided by work trees underneath) but I have an orchestrator agent who is the one I talk to 90% of the time and who is responsible for summarizing information from various project manager agents and only update tiles in the dashboard when I actually need to do something, in the form of questions I can answer directly.
  Over time as I add more preferences for how to work, the orchestrator sends fewer and fewer requests to me that it can handle itself.
  1. phildenhoff · 1791054194 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, I do love building it... but it's a bit of a time-sink, y'know?
    I used Orca for ages and that was great; I'm just tired of having to scroll back through a convo to find that "one last blocking question" that Claude or Codex spit out 15 tool calls and subagent messages ago.
    Building my own tool is super fun though...
2. arunbhatia · 1791065825 · focus · HN ↗
  thats a great point - we will keep that in mind while building offrun.dev
3. HisashiSpace · 1791130684 · focus · HN ↗
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sbalineni · 1791050009 · focus · HN ↗
how can I connect to Supero.dev via MCP to build a multi tenant app on supero.dev platofrm? any idea ?
edwardyen724 · 1791067371 · focus · HN ↗
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wolf2016 · 1791172367 · focus · HN ↗
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