This Repo Just Solved The #1 Claude + Codex Headache
CChase AI
Computing/SoftwareSmall Business/StartupsInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00If you're someone who uses Claude code and codecs at the same time, or really any combination
00:00:04of different coding agents, then you understand the pain of having six, seven, eight different
00:00:09terminals open at the same time, and trying to not only monitor all of them simultaneously,
00:00:14but figure out which ones need your attention first, and God forbid you accidentally exit out
00:00:19of one of those windows when they're in the middle of something. But there's an open source
00:00:22tool that can solve all of these problems for us. It's lightweight, it works on Mac and Windows,
00:00:27and I'm going to show you exactly how to use it today. Now the tool I'm talking about
00:00:31is Herder. Herder is a terminal multiplexer. That means I can control multiple terminals
00:00:35from a single space. And that looks something like this. I have two Claude code terminals
00:00:39open at the top, open code down here on the left, and then down on the bottom right, I have codecs.
00:00:44Now Herder really buys us three things. One, organization. Two, the ability to easily monitor
00:00:49multiple tabs. And then three, persistence. So in terms of organization, pretty clear,
00:00:54this is a lot easier to work with versus just having a bunch of terminal tabs just out in space
00:01:00on my desktop. This is also agent forward. You can see here over on the left, I have the different
00:01:05agents being listed. And when it comes to monitoring, it will show me exactly which ones are working,
00:01:10when they're done, or if they've been stuck. And then third, in terms of persistence,
00:01:14if one of these tabs is creating something, let's say it's working on a specific feature on my app,
00:01:19and I close this thing out, like I actually exit out. Well, it doesn't stop. In fact, it's Herder
00:01:25acts as a server. So even if I exit out of that window, it's still running in the background,
00:01:30and I can very easily bring it back up. And before I dive into those three sections of more detail,
00:01:34which is the organization, monitoring, and persistence, let me address the question a lot
00:01:39of you probably have right now, which is, how does this differ from Tmux and Cmux? Tmux has been
00:01:44around for years, and essentially does the same thing in terms of controlling all your terminals
00:01:48from a single place. Well, compared to Tmux, this is agent forward. Over here, we have this agents
00:01:53tab on the left. And like I alluded to earlier, this gives us the ability to see which agents are running,
00:01:59which need our input, and which are done. So it's very easy to control not just two, three, or four
00:02:05terminals, but five, six, seven, eight, even ones you can't necessarily see visually. Tmux doesn't do
00:02:09that out of the box. Now, when we compare it to Cmux, the biggest difference is persistence,
00:02:14and also the fact that I can use Herder very easily on Windows. Now, remember, in terms of
00:02:18persistence, it's the idea that I have it working on something, I exit out in the middle of its work,
00:02:22it keeps running in the background, and I can even get back to it from my phone or SSHN. So that's a
00:02:27brief overview of what Herder buys us and how it compares to the competition. Now, let's talk about
00:02:31actually installing and using it. So to install this thing, very, very easy. It is one line of code.
00:02:36So if you head to herder.dev, or if you just head to the Herder GitHub, you will find these commands
00:02:41here. So it's literally, you know, right here. This command right here, just copy this, open it in
00:02:47your terminal and paste it in. So let's actually do that from the beginning. So once you've installed
00:02:52it, all you have to do is open up your terminal and type in Herder. And what you're going to see is
00:02:56three things. We have spaces, we have agents, and then we have our actual terminal. So this just works
00:03:03like a normal terminal. If I open up Claude code inside of there, boom, I have Claude code. And I can
00:03:09see now that Claude is listed as an agent in the chase space. So what are spaces? Think of spaces as
00:03:16projects. So I have this space, this project right now that's inside of chase. I can create a new project
00:03:23right here. I can rename it. So let's call this, I don't know, web design, save it. And also the cool
00:03:32thing with Herder is I can actually like click on things with my mouse. It isn't purely keybinds.
00:03:37So let's say I have a new project I'm working on. It's called web design test. And I also have Claude
00:03:42code opened up in there. So I have my main space and I have my web design space. And you can see
00:03:48those agents both listed here. So they can be working on different things. I can see what they're doing
00:03:53and where they're at without those terminals necessarily being visible. So spaces are the
00:03:56highest level, right? They're almost like folders we're working inside. Inside of each space,
00:04:01we have panes and agents and tabs. So I'm on tab one here inside of the chase space. If I tab over
00:04:10again, I can name it whatever I want. But this is almost like just creating a new terminal tab like
00:04:13you would inside of your normal terminal or inside of PowerShell. So if I open up Claude again, what do
00:04:19I got? Well, now I have two tabs. Easy enough. You can see them listed over here on the left. Now inside
00:04:24each tab, I can have different visible panes. So if I right click here and I hit split right,
00:04:30well then I can open up Codex. So now I have very clearly Claude code and Codex inside the chase space
00:04:38inside of tab one. So it's almost just like folders are the spaces. The first layer of subfolders is the
00:04:45tabs. And within each tab, I can have as many agents as I want working. So if we take that, you know,
00:04:52for this case, maybe in this first tab, I rename this and this is for research. Okay.
00:04:59So I'm over here in this section, this is where I'm going to be doing all my research and I've been
00:05:02doing it with Claude and Codex. And tab number two, maybe this is just going to be the dev server.
00:05:09Okay. I'm just purely going to be using this to like mess with the dev server or something like
00:05:13that. Right. So this just allows you to like very clearly organize things and put them and put them
00:05:18in different buckets. And all this is meant to fight the chaos that happens when you have a ton of
00:05:22terminals with a ton of agents doing a ton of different things. I have my spaces to keep me organized.
00:05:26I have my tabs within the spaces to keep my like subtasks within that project organized. And over
00:05:33here on the left with the agents tab, I can always tab through and see which one is working and which
00:05:38one's done. And I find this super useful if you're using something like Claude to talk to Codex and
00:05:43Codex to talk to Claude, because oftentimes we do that in a headless manner, right? I'm just having
00:05:47Claude create this headless, you know, instance of Codex and it's sending stuff back and forth and you don't
00:05:53really see what they're actually doing. But with this, it's really easy to get sort of eyes on what
00:05:58they're doing. For example, I have a skill that has Claude, Code and Codex go back and forth when
00:06:04they're having a plan, right? They do a bunch of iterations till they get on the same page. Normally
00:06:07it's done headlessly, but inside of Herder, it's very easy for me to make that visible to me across
00:06:12the entire process. So for example, let me actually show you that in action. Hey, can you use the Codex
00:06:17review skill to create a, we're using this as a demo, a fake plan for creating some sort of web app.
00:06:26I want you to come up with a plan and then I want you to execute it using the Codex review. So you
00:06:32create the plan and you send it to Codex. I want you to use the Herder skill so that you create a new
00:06:38pane inside of Herder showing me the actual back and forth so it's visible. And you might've noticed me
00:06:44mention the Herder skill during that. So the Herder skill tells your agents how to use Herder. So your
00:06:51agents can actually spawn different panes inside of Herder. They can create different spaces. So you
00:06:56don't have to manually control all this organization. Your actual agents can do it for you. And all you
00:07:01have to do to install it is paste in this one line of code inside of your terminal. You can find a link
00:07:07to that on the Herder GitHub right here where it talks about agent skills. And of note, there's also an
00:07:12entire plugin marketplace for Herder. So if you follow the link right here, you can see people
00:07:17started to add a bunch of different, you know, sort of add-ons to this Herder construct. Now,
00:07:23while this is working, let me show you some other stuff. We can tell that this particular agent is
00:07:27working because we sort of have this little yellow snake thing going on over here on the left.
00:07:32If I hit menu and go to settings, I can change the theme, sounds, toast, labels, integrations,
00:07:38and experiments. If I right click on any of the panes, I can rename them, split them right up, down,
00:07:43zoom in, zoom out, all that good stuff. So now on the right, you can see the pane that Claude code
00:07:49opened up and we have the Codex critic here. So Claude created a plan. It sent it to Codex. And you
00:07:53can see right here, Codex coming up with essentially all of its issues with the plan that Fable came up
00:08:00with. So again, instead of it being headless, I can actually see this happen in real time. And then
00:08:04it's going to send its revised plan back to Codex. Because you can see here, the verdict is revised
00:08:10and they have this back and forth all the way till the end, till they get to a proper plan. So now let's
00:08:14show off the persistence aspect. We can see both of these agents over here on the left are in the
00:08:19middle of doing work. Now let's exit the terminal completely. And despite it being on, it's still
00:08:24working in the background. So if I click on PowerShell and I bring up the terminal again, and I just do
00:08:30Herder, well, there we go. They're still working, which is great, right? So as long as your computer
00:08:38is still on, all this is going to persist, which means if you're on like a laptop or something and
00:08:43you close it, but you still have it actually running and doesn't just put it to sleep, you know, you can
00:08:47have your agents going for as long as you want. Now, if you actually want to shut down those sessions,
00:08:51all you have to do is right click it and hit close pane. And you can also shut down the spaces in
00:08:56their entirety by just right clicking on them and hitting close. Now, the last thing I'll mention
00:09:00with Herder is the keybind. So if I go to menu and I go to keybinds, you see all the keybinds available
00:09:06to us. Like I said, the cool thing about Herder, a lot of it can be done with the mouse and keyboard.
00:09:11But if you want to use the keybinds, understand it is similar to Tmux. So you essentially have to hit
00:09:16like control plus B, which is going to be your prefix mode. And then from there, there's a series
00:09:22of keybinds that will do stuff. So if it says prefix plus V to split vertical, that means I would do
00:09:27control B, way to B, and then hit V. So that would look something like control B. So now my machine
00:09:34understands I'm talking about something I'm doing inside of Herder. I hit V, boom, there we go.
00:09:39But I understand a lot of this can be done with like right clicks and that sort of thing.
00:09:42But just wanted to mention that other than that, that's pretty much like 90% of Herder. You also
00:09:47have the ability to kind of like set this up with your phone and all that. But I think the real value
00:09:52add here is when you're on your actual machine, you're running a bunch of agents across different
00:09:56coding harnesses. Like agent view inside of cloud code is great, but that only works inside of cloud
00:10:01code, right? Oftentimes I want to use codex. Oftentimes I bring in something from open code. So
00:10:06this just is awesome for the monitoring piece, for the organization piece. And I really like the whole
00:10:12persistence aspect because I have exited out of terminals before when they're in the middle of
00:10:17doing work. So it's open source. You can use it for free and it works on Windows and Mac, like I said
00:10:23before. So try it out. Let me know what you think. Other than that, I'll see you guys around.