Comment by jpeeler

2 days ago

I'm currently using herde[1] to handle/supervise multiple agents (with some patches I need to try to upstream) along with Nono[2] for sandboxing. This sandboxing approach avoids use of a microVM, which lets me use tooling I already have installed inside the sandbox. The downside is getting all the policies correct as it seems every project needs some new type of access, though Nono does try to make policy writing easy.

I've been considering switching my approach to using a microVM through microsandbox[3]. The pro of this approach is you can essentially skip the policies and rely on the security of the VM boundary. The negative is that now you've lost all your installed tools, so you need to either provision at runtime or build something (like an image) beforehand to match your dev environment.

I still don't know which is less maintenance. And while I think herde is pretty well thought out, I do think about something that works outside the terminal may be nicer.

[1] https://github.com/ogulcancelik/herdr

[2] https://github.com/always-further/nono

[3] https://github.com/superradcompany/microsandbox

Thanks for sharing. I recently started using my homemade “competitor” to herde, so it’s nice to compare against prior art.

What do you think could be nicer with a native app? More mouse or visual interactions? Modern design and gui?

  • The kitty developer is philosophically against multiplexers, but he also has concern about performance (which I share somewhat as well). Herde is not quite as fully featured as zellij/tmux, so that partially is biasing me. I think that a native app could be potentially nicer to avoid all those concerns, along with my setup (only in Linux really) of a tiling manager handling the windowing instead of that being part of the solution. A big part of the value add of Herde is actually the monitoring of the Claude session and not so much the multiplexing reimplementation. One of my patches allows jumping to the next blocked/finished session so I can quickly give feedback or observe different agents. I can envision a GUI solution for that workflow being something better than what a terminal easily allows.