Agent-Manager: A Tmux TUI for Running Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode

yoanwaidev

I run three or four coding agents at once and the part that eats my time isn't the coding, it's that I can't tell what state any of them is in without tabbing through every terminal. One of them is usually sitting on a permission prompt I never saw. agent-manager is a Go binary on top of tmux. No config file, no daemon, no server. Every agent shows up in one list with a live status, grouped by the project it's running in. Status comes from reading the pane, so adding a CLI is a few lines of regex in a toml file rather than an integration. The keystroke I use constantly is space: press it on an agent, type, enter, and the prompt lands in that agent's pane without attaching. Press it on a project row and you get a new agent already working on what you typed. ctrl+r opens what an agent changed as whole files with the diff highlighted, and a comment left on a line is sent back to that agent as a prompt. Sessions are plain tmux sessions, so quitting the manager leaves everything running and v reattaches a session with its conversation intact. I built it for four agents and most days I use it with one. Still rough in places, and I'd like to hear what breaks for you.

chrismatic

How is this different from https://github.com/asheshgoplani/agent-deck ?

mark_l_watson

This looks really good, but for me the timing of seeing agent-manager is bad: I read about the similar Herdr on HN several days ago and I have completely changed my dev setup for the better. I have always been a traditional simple command line tool kind of developer (I am an old man, old habbits die hard!) but I recommend at least a one day experiment with tools like agent-manager and/or Herdr that integrate tools like Claude Code and OpenCode into an integrated work environment. I have been hacking on my own Emacs based agentic coding and work environment (so much fun!) but my recent experience with Herdr has been much more productive. Anyway, the docs for agent-manager look good, I look forward to reading HNer’s experience with it.

lucianmarin

Isn't this what https://www.superlogical.com/ supposed to accomplish?

igor_nast

Nice, but I love my agentic IDE app. I prefer normal gui over terminal. Good luck!

skeledrew

Finding it a bit wild that I've been working on something somewhat similar for a few weeks now.

aghuang

How does this compare to something like herdr which does all of this? https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr

petesergeant

“How does this differ from”… For all of these tools, now, there are many. After I built my own agent sandboxer[0] I went so far as to create a site dedicated to 36 other similar projects / approaches: https://pleasedonotescape.com/ 0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre

meitham

Claude comes with very nice hook-api you can use it to customise notifications and allow tmux window to blink or to come to the front when Claude needs your attention

hamaluik

There seem to be a lot of these sorts of tools popping up but it’s not clear to me the added value they bring in over using plain tmux (or any other “normal” session multiplexer). Can someone who uses one of these agent-specific multiplexers share their experience and reasoning for reaching for / building these? What makes this better than a normal multiplexer? I am asking in earnest; I just don’t understand but I want to.

luckystarr

Shameless plug for my project, which is a bit different. I had the problem of crashing terminals due to OOM kills and wanted to switch to a more lightweight terminal. Also I had too many of them and couldn't find the right one any more. I thought, why not build one yourself. The result: https://github.com/ThePixelPilgrim/kabelsalat It has GTK tabbed, (almost) transparently tmux-backed terminals (so quitting or crashing the app and starting it up again restores the state) in colored, named groups. I recently added Wayland app embedding to run Chrome side by side with the terminal, local to each group, but this is still a bit shaky. Would be nice if someone would test drive it and give me some feedback. :)

reverius42

Am I the only one who prefers a full on GUI (eg Claude Desktop)?

kaydub

I'm going to be blunt. I don't care about any more AI tools.

adamas

Everybody has a TUI for running Claude Code these days, huh?

pandinus

There's also https://github.com/code-yeongyu/oh-my-openagent which is very active

daveed

Nice! Might want to just plug my personal project too - which is more of a gui for managing agents across restarts, and tracking their context: https://github.com/itsdchen/gogoagent

mrbonner

I use coding agent but still don’t see the need to manage a swarm of them like this. Is there an actual use case for this or this is just for tokenmaxxing?

hmokiguess

I decided to test herdr and orca today and I'm really impressed with both, especially orca. I had no idea how far the ADE / multiplexer space was, I'm very excited for more progress in this space!