Connecting the Machines

Comments

Comment by bigcat12345678 3 hours ago

Makes sense.

I had always been curious on why Tailscale hasn't creating agent-oriented features. It's obvious to me that Tailscale is at the best position (AFAIK) to capitalize on agents demand.

Their connectivity product is unique. And it's a natural fit to connecting long-running agents instance across the Internet.

Comment by kelvinjps10 1 hour ago

It would be good if they released a good mobile app I'm have been using termux and moshi and claude code. Termux and moshi provide the full functionality of the terminal but it gets clunky sometimes and with claude code you don't get the full functionality and a lot of stuff are missing from the tui

Comment by evanpurkhiser 4 hours ago

I’ve been running codex’s remote app server as a systemd service for the last several months, and before that opencode remote. It’s very easy to switch between my phone and desktop app.

I haven’t tried herdr yet, but maybe it’s just not targeted at me?

The real problem I have with the remote codex setup is when it needs to authenticate as me. I sort of solved this for sudo and ssh with this [1], but I think something like this could be integrated deeper into the harness

[1]: https://github.com/evanpurkhiser/agent-witness

Comment by bibstha 4 hours ago

Worth giving onorca.dev a try. That already supports this with nice UI. Also atcyrus.com is interesting to delegate tasks too.

Comment by sirkiller 4 hours ago

How do you feel they compare?

Comment by bibstha 2 hours ago

Onorca.dev is very similar but has a desktop UI that I prefer to herdr. I find it easier to work with. Being UI, it has markdown reader, a native browser integration, linear or github built in integration. So working with multiple different unrelated projects feels natural. Go to linear, select a ticket -> start in X workspace, go to github, select an issue and start in Y workspace.

The limitation of Orca or Herdr is that they don't have integration for multi project work. Here is what I wanted

Telegram/OpenClaw → Single Linear Account Control plane with multiple projects → route each task to be completed and PRs open for review across multiple repos.

This is where Cyrus helps. You setup labels and routing so cyrus knows which gitrepo to build worktrees from, and the labels can help you pick up the right model (codex-sol/astro or claude-opus/fable). This has helped me be more hands off.

So I use both Orca and Cyrus. Cyrus for automation (telegram ingress) vs Orca if I want anything hands on.

Comment by mrlinx 1 hour ago

love orca, but they severely need mobile support

Comment by well_ackshually 1 hour ago

>Backed by YCombinator

will turn into absolute dogshit within weeks, use proper software.

Comment by alex7o 5 minutes ago

Hacker news is still fine tho?

Comment by CharlesW 4 hours ago

I'm hoping someone can explain why this is interesting.

I get that Herdr wants investors to give them money to own developers' coding sessions, but the value proposition ("Walk away and they keep working. Come back from any machine and they're where you left them.") seems like a miss since it's so easy to do that without them.

I'm surely missing something.

Comment by acron0 2 hours ago

Well, they're mainly introducing Herdr Cloud which I take to be similar to Tailscale (and other comments seem to support this too). `herdr login` on any machine, anywhere and suddenly that box joins your Herdr network of boxes you can connect to and deploy agents to. This is totally doable with Tailscale today, but maybe there's other features that can only be realised with some kind of cooperation at or above the network level?

Comment by hext 4 hours ago

This is fantastic to see, I've been daily driving herdr at work and at home for a few months now. It's great. My biggest complaint has been exactly this, I want all of my ssh sessions available in one spot. Excited to try it out.

Comment by ahknight 4 hours ago

Why would I want a service for this when I could easily run such a discovery service myself? Why not just release that tool to users? SyncThing offers its discovery server for self-hosting as an example.

Oh, right, this is how we monetize in 2026. Nevermind.

Comment by hext 4 hours ago

As they explicitly state in the docs, there is no reason to use their cloud service if the machines are accessible to each other via SSH.

Comment by qingshan3 3 hours ago

I have been running herdr since yesterday, and have been using this feature to connect multiple machines. Now I want to delegate most of tmux keys to herdr for consistent experience.

Comment by rvz 3 hours ago

Again it bears repeating [0] that if you don't pay for your tools and expect open source maintainers to do it for free, then they will most certainly take funding from VCs and angels instead.

Now they have raised $6M in funding. [1]

Do not be surprised to realize that open source does not pay their bills.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201743

[1] https://herdr.dev/blog/herdr-raised-a-seed/

Comment by evil-olive 4 hours ago

> But until now, each machine needed a separate Herdr client, usually in a different terminal tab. You had to remember where each agent was running and switch between those tabs to check on them. That was the bottleneck.

is it, though?

I can imagine having a local Herdr instance and one running on a remote box somewhere, but I can't think of a use case where I'm trying to juggle N different Herdr instances and that overhead becomes a meaningful bottleneck.

> Getting to 1.0

> After this update, what I want is to make connecting those machines more convenient. You shouldn’t need to think about SSH or deal with complicated network setup. It should be easy to connect any machine, anywhere, through one Herdr account.

(emphasis added)

sigh. I'm a daily user of Herdr. I don't have a Herdr account today. I don't want a Herdr account. I don't need a Herdr account.

the product is not even to 1.0 yet and already the writing is on the wall for the path towards enshittification & acquisition by $bigco.

of course, I'm sure there will be some "usage without an account will still work" platitudes, but the trend of development is clearly going to be in the direction of features that "integrate" with the "developers using Herdr pay us money and/or we collect their data" business model.

Comment by threecheese 3 hours ago

Same. If asked to create an account, I suspect a lot of us will decline and move on.

The reason Herdr is novel, IMO, is its runtime owns the PTYs and builds a bidirectional messaging system on top of that. It’s like Pi’s RPC - a very limited version of it - which allows one to hook into agent i/o without needing to invoke “$agentcli -p”. There’s a lot they could build on that, and so I wonder why a managed cloud play was first on their list.

Comment by well_ackshually 3 hours ago

>the product is not even to 1.0 yet and already the writing is on the wall for the path towards enshittification & acquisition by $bigco.

https://herdr.dev/blog/herdr-is-joining-y-combinator/

On the wall ? It's spray painted in big neon letters, and by themselves, lmao. Herdr cannot be trusted.

Comment by cobbzilla 2 hours ago

Sorry but whenever I hear the name of this tech I visualize the stereotypical “dumb person” saying “hurr, durr” nonsense words

Comment by widowlark 1 hour ago

I thought that was the joke? Its both 'herding the agents' and hurrdurr this is so freakin simple

Comment by cobbzilla 59 minutes ago

Forgive me, I don’t generally ascribe positive connotations to the phrase. It’s about as funny as wearing an “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt.

Comment by ActionHank 4 hours ago

I am not sure I fully understand the need to farm out sufficient work that I need a network of machines to do it. Unless you're just slop farming.

Comment by hext 4 hours ago

You don't understand why some people might have multiple machines they connect to at any given time?