Show HN: Baton – A desktop app for developing with AI agents
Hi, I built this because running multiple Claude Code agents across multiple IDE and terminal windows was getting messy. Like many, I went from working at one thing at the time, to multiple, and it was all changing quite fast. I needed one place to see all my agents and worktrees, seamlessly switch between them, monitor their status and once their done, review their changes. I also wanted to quickly spin up new agents in isolated worktrees whenever an idea came to mind. I've been building Baton from within Baton for a while now, which has been a pretty fun loop. Would love to hear what you think!
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
twostorytower
Congrats on your launch! How is this different than Conductor?
toastal
> Features It’s blank. Lots of blank gray rectangles too. Site is broken?
sausajez
Please review the site design. Between the thin blue lines appearing & disappearing, and the "television static" in the background I gave up attempting to read anything in the first 30 seconds on the site because my eyes were drawn anywhere other than the content.
drewfis
Go away, I'm baitin'!
throwaw12
This looks impressive! How do you restore the state from the old workspaces? do you spawn tmux and resume the conversation or do you do it differently? from the video it felt like instant
jeffrwells
I started building a similar project for myself, a terminal PTY running through a desktop daemon: https://youtu.be/6KY-HCn3SaA The fun part being it worked on mobile too: https://youtube.com/shorts/CmemwDGwpx8?si=xzAJBb8ha7DLIDmY It was more of a tool for myself but some interest from others inspired me so iterating on it. People interested in this kind of thing should join my slack! https://monetworkspace.com/terminal
riskable
How can people afford to use Claude Code like this‽ Is everyone just playing with it on their employer's dime or what?
zephyrwhimsy
I have seen teams spend months fine-tuning retrieval algorithms when the real issue was that their ingestion pipeline was feeding HTML boilerplate into the vector store. Fix the input first.
zephyrwhimsy
The observability stack (logs, metrics, traces) is often an afterthought but should be a first-class architectural concern. You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and you cannot debug what you cannot observe.
saberience
Nice work! Congrats on the release, did you check out Vibe-Kanban or Emdash which are both building in this space? https://www.emdash.sh/ https://vibekanban.com/ What is your secret sauce, so to speak? I personally built my own local tools and system for this, I tried vibekanban but didn't feel like it added much to my productivity, haven't tried emdash yet.
Renaud
Nice tool for working multiple sessions without them tripping over each-other. I appreciate that you provided multiple OS versions rather than just go for Mac only like some.
electrovir
I've built my own as well, in a terminal. Not pretty, but does the job until something better comes along (maybe Baton is that something better): https://github.com/electrovir/agent-storm
BrandiATMuhkuh
Very cool. And congrats on the launch. I started to use superset 2 days ago. Which seems similar. It's pretty nice: https://superset.sh Fyi: here are some things I would like to have for such a tool - notification when an agent is done - each tabs/space has its own terminal, browser, agent - each tab/space runs in a sandbox (eg docker) - each tab/space can run my dev server. But must not conflict with the other dev servers running - each tab/space has a mcp server for the built in browser Nice to have: - remote access against my machine/tabs - being able to make screenshots
ismail
I have not done much multi-agent development. Trying to understand what problem this solves, surely one can spin up multiple terminal tabs?
flippyhead
This looks great. How do you compare to cmux?
ale
I don’t know how to phrase this without sounding like an arrogant idiot but seriously: what are people actually programming with agents + worktrees + harnesses + tasks + skills + whatnot? Most workflows I see people adopt involve large amounts of infrastructural fluff only to (more) quickly generate what I (anecdotally) have seen is somewhere between code generation of boilerplatish React/laravel/your-fav-framework components for web or native, and niche toy apps for mostly personal use. My very limited usage of agents has been for scanning large (bloated) codebases to get rid of unused code, meaning time consuming and tedious tasks. But it seems the general trend is that programmers just want faster horses?
ninininino
Are agents at worktree level or can a single agent and chat work on a parent directory above multiple worktrees of different repos?
mellosouls
Best of luck with this but I think with so many open source agent managers cropping up, you are going to need to provide very special USP to have people choose yours over the free and open versions. I guess I would suggest that should be a priority for your site and documentation, to help devs understand what that value offer is. Your site does seem nicely presented though and clarity in capability is possibly an early win over some of the more chaotic documentation elsewhere.
causal
I'm confused, I've been running parallel agents on different worktrees within a single view of Claude Desktop for at least a month. I don't see any new features here?
ohnoesjmr
Maybe I'm daft, I watched the video, and I just didn't understand what this is, or why I'd use it. Seems like just tabs of claude code, plus markdown viewer which can just be another tab (with an editor) in a tabbed terminal? My ide supports multiple terminal tabs, plus is a project aware code viewer, and has the ability to run the project. What would I gain by using this?