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by ymir_e 2 days ago
I've tested out just about every tool like this, and ended up coding my own, it is really minimal though.

The primary reason people reach for these tools are two to three reasons:

1. Tmux does not natively show agent statuses of agents / notify you when one needs input. Helpful when you have a huge list of small things to fix: I just spin up N agents in parallel to handle all of them, then I go over and review.

2. Tmux does not handle worktree handling. If you wanna make changes in parallel you cannot have two agents make db migrations at the same time. The way to solve for this is to have them work on two different worktrees with separate environments, ports etc.

3. Tmux tree view is not super beautiful, especially for viewing agents.

I built this as a tmux plugin since I don't really want to opt-out of tmux as a whole, especially since I like my keybindings there.

https://github.com/Ymirke/tmux-agent-switcher

4 comments

This looks nice, but I think a screenshot or three in the README would help bring it to life better
Great input. Added a screenshot to the readme:

https://github.com/Ymirke/tmux-agent-switcher

In your experience using your plugin (and the other tools that do something similar like herdr), does it make doing a larger volume of work feel more manageable? In my experience thus far, surfacing/managing session state is only part of the issue, context switching between them is another entirely and feels like the real productivity bottleneck for me
You're spot on here.

If you're truly multi-tasking with this type of setup it feels more like "tiktok coding", "brainrot coding", or any other term that should be used for it.

I'm pretty sure we're moving away from it, the agent you interact with via voice or typing will go to a higher and higher abstraction level, and you won't have to effectively micro-manage them.

> The way to solve for this is to have them work on two different worktrees with separate environments, ports

What are you using for the environment part? Containers?

Please continue developing this I’m sick of all these one-offs that escape the mature good tooling we already have.