Herdr Open source

What it does

Herdr is a terminal runtime — a tmux-like session host, not a coding agent itself — built specifically to run AI coding agents persistently. It keeps agent sessions alive in a background server so you can detach, close your laptop, or lose an SSH connection without killing the work, and gives you one window across your local machine and saved remote machines.

What is inside

• Persistent sessions that survive client disconnects and restore layout after a server/machine restart (the underlying agent processes themselves do not survive a restart)
• Status indicators per pane (working / blocked / idle)
• A combined local + remote SSH agent list with independent reconnects
• An agent-native CLI and socket API so agents can spawn panes, prompt each other, and detect when another agent is genuinely blocked
• A plugin marketplace for extending panes and workflows
• tmux-style keyboard prefixes plus full mouse support (click, drag, split)

Works with

The README explicitly lists Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, and Grok — "herdr doesn't wrap or replace them; it owns their terminals."

Pricing

Herdr itself is fully free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license; installing and running it locally, and across your own SSH-reachable machines, costs nothing. The only pricing signal on herdr.dev is that a hosted "Herdr Cloud" tier is listed as "coming soon," with no price or feature list published yet.

How to install or connect

curl -fsSL https://herdr.dev/install.sh | sh

Alternatives shown in the README: brew install herdr, mise use -g herdr, or on Windows powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://herdr.dev/install.ps1 | iex". Then run:

herdr

Maintenance and safety

Very actively developed (commits land daily) as a single Rust binary with no Electron dependency, under the Apache-2.0 license. The project maintains detailed internal engineering and release-process documentation, a good maintenance signal, though its agent-native API and plugin marketplace are still evolving. Star and fork counts have grown sharply in the last month, which is worth treating as a momentum signal rather than a maturity guarantee for a still-young project.

Who should use it

Anyone running long-lived terminal coding agents across one or more machines who wants to detach and reattach without losing state, or who juggles several agents at once (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Grok) and needs one place to see which ones are stuck. It's a good fit if you already work over SSH to remote dev boxes and are tired of losing panes to dropped connections.