Herdr joins Y Combinator, keeps runtime open source
Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
Can, the solo developer behind Herdr, announces that the open-source agent runtime is joining Y Combinator's F26 batch. Herdr, which has gained 25k GitHub stars and 340k downloads, offers a terminal-based runtime and TUI for managing coding agents. The core remains free under Apache-2.0, with plans to build a connected experience across machines and expand the ecosystem of clients and plugins.
I am the bottleneck.
- ahmadyan
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 Superlogical and Agentastic.dev (by yours truly).
One thing I find particularly interesting is the role of open source in this market.
A lot of these products started open source (i assume as a tactical way to gain traction and build a community). But after the early traction phase or raise funding, the incentives seem to change.
Being open source by itself is not a product differentiator in this market. The features required for string positioning (orchestration, cloud, custom agents, enterprise features, hosted infrastructure, etc.) often end up either closed source or available only through the hosted product.
That makes me wonder how much developers actually value OSS for this category. How much does it matter to you whether your IDE or coding environment is open source?
Is OSS important because you want to inspect the code, fork it, self-host it, avoid vendor lock-in, or simply because you trust open-source developer tools more? Or, for desktop software like IDEs is open source mostly a nice-to-have rather than a requirement? So I’m curious where HN lands on this
- ValentineC
> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem.
I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.
- user-
Congrats to Can! I am using Herdr and i think its a great tool. A modern solo dev success story , very inspirational.
I see some negative comments here that I could understand why funding scares them when it comes to their open source tool but like.. atleast congratulate the guy.
- kristjansson
As a relatively recent herdr user, I’ll say (1) congratulations and (2) the thing that was most attractive was the seeming orthogonality of the tool. It sits apart, interfaces with subordinate programs in a few clearly delineated ways, and integrates them only as much as the user desires. Critically, “no integration just show me the terminal output of my program” is an option, and a useful one!
I appreciate that discipline and respect for your user in the current tool, and hope to be a paying customer of a similarly values-aligned business you’ll build on top of it!
- humblepie
Okay, back to tmux it is then.
- asadm
I am guessing this now directly competes with mitchellh's multiplexer / Superlogical.
- 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).
- smagnuso
I thought I'd share that hydra recently added support for herdr directly. It is an agent multiplexer of its own, but can directly create herdr tabs for sessions: