herdup

Put a team of AIs on your code.

One coding agent is easy. A team of them is a mess of terminals, flags and prompts. herdup does that setup and hands you the reins.

Download See how it works

Windows, macOS and Linux · free and open source · needs herdr installed

Scroll
01

Four agents is not four times one.

Four terminals. Four sets of permission flags. The same “do you trust this folder?” question, four times. Then you brief each one by hand and hope you said the same thing twice. Most people give up before finding out whether a team beats a single agent.

02

You don’t micromanage a herd. You point it.

Pick a folder. Pick how much help you want. herdup builds the layout, starts each tool, waits until each one is genuinely at its prompt, and hands it its instructions.

03

You see the shape before you get it.

One lane per teammate, the lead’s lane marked. Remove anyone by dismissing their lane. Nothing has touched your code yet.

The actual app

herdup asking which project to work on
Which project. Recent folders first. If a folder has no version history, or uncommitted changes, it says so here — before anything starts.
herdup showing the workspace with six teammates
Who’s on it. Start from a size, then add or remove anyone. The picture is the workspace you’re about to get.
herdup after a teammate has been removed
Your own line-up. Dismiss a lane and the team reshapes. The count follows; the preset steps aside.

These are screenshots of the built app, taken by its own test harness — not mockups.

What it’s for

herdup is a launcher, not a wrapper. It does the setup — layout, startup, readiness, briefing — and then gets out of the way and gives you the terminal. Once your team is running, herdup is not in the loop and not between you and your tools.

Several projects can run at once. Each launch gets its own workspace, so a team working on one repo keeps going while you start another.

Requirements

herdr 0.8.2 or newer

herdup drives herdr, the terminal multiplexer that actually runs the agents. It must be installed and on your PATH. herdup checks the version and refuses to launch against anything older, because it relies on herdr’s agent API.

At least one agent CLI

herdup starts tools you already have; it does not bundle or resell them. You need at least one of the tools below installed and signed in. Their subscriptions and API costs are between you and them.

git, strongly recommended

Not required, but these agents edit files. Without version history there is no undo, and herdup will warn you every time.

A terminal

Windows Terminal on Windows (PowerShell as a fallback), Terminal.app on macOS, or whatever x-terminal-emulator points at on Linux.

Supported tools

Any of these can fill any role on a team. herdup knows each one’s command, its permission flags, and whether it can be briefed unattended.

The list lives in a plain registry.toml you can edit, so adding a tool herdup has never heard of does not require a new build.

One deliberate limitation

herdup only types instructions into an agent unattended when it can reliably tell the agent is at its prompt rather than sitting behind a dialog. Where that has not been verified, it holds the instructions and asks you to release them after a look. This exists because an early version fired a briefing into a tool showing a “trust this folder?” prompt, and the Enter keypress answered the dialog instead.

Download

Installers are built by CI for each release. Nothing is code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will both warn you on first run.

Windows .msi installer or .exe setup tested macOS .dmg — Apple silicon and Intel built, not yet exercised Linux .deb and .AppImage built, not yet exercised

Honest status: herdup is developed and tested on Windows. The macOS and Linux installers come from the same CI and the same commit, but nobody has yet run them on a real desktop. If you try one, please say what happened.

Support

Bugs and questions

Open an issue on GitHub. Include your OS, your herdr version (herdr --version), and which tools were on the team.

It isn’t finding my tool

herdup looks for each tool’s binary on your PATH and tells you exactly what it looked for. If yours lives somewhere unusual, edit registry.toml rather than waiting for a release.

What herdup never does

It does not send your code anywhere, add a service between you and your tools, or require an account. The only thing that leaves your machine is an optional “create a GitHub repository” action you have to ask for.