I really like the bit where he transferred ownership of Ghostty to a non-profit, and is now building this new company on that as an open source dependency:
> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.
Kind of depends on the governance, which i am mot familiar with. Would be a shame for him to lose control when he has done a decent job so far. Transferring governance has turned into a woke mess enough times to be concerning.
This sounds like a mashup of of several things I've been playing with lately...
- pi-web (https://pi-web.dev/): a web frontend for the Pi coding harness which can multiplex pi sessions across multiple machines
- herdr (https://herdr.dev/): a fairly polished agentic multiplexer TUI, can easily spawn or destroy windows based on subagent activity
- firstmate (https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate): a meta environment for coding harnesses - more naturally handles spawning and communicating with subagents, managing worktrees, and other SDLC functions, and has a fairly large number of constraints thru bash scripts to ensure better results with less intelligent models
I've been working on collie[1] a plugin for herdr that runs a web app on the herdr host which can then be served via tailscale for example. This has made accessing my agents on the go a lot easier, paired with session persistence from herdr it's been quite nice to work with.
As someone who has never used sublime I don’t get the analogy, but what do you like about herdr? Is it worth using? I came across it along with hunk at the same time and I’ve been using hunk a bit but didn’t really see the appeal of herdr over just my usual batch of terminal windows.
Herdr is my daily driver. It is lightweight and snappy while also being customisable (hence the Sublime Text analogy). I like that, while it supports tmux-style shortcuts, you can also use the mouse, so the learning curve is very gentle. In addition it's cross platform (Mac/Linux/Win) which is great for me because I needed something I can use on different machines.
Not the OP. I tried Orca for a few days, though I liked being able to manage git worktrees from the UI and being able to leave comments for the agent while I'm reviewing the diff, I found editing experience too slow for daily use. It's also missing some minor polish issues (vim bindings, being able to change default shell etc.) that were deal breakers for me.
The first app in this space was VibeTunnel[1]. It basically lets you start terminals on your Mac and the web app allows you to control these terminals on your iPhone using Tailscale. In the end, it’s just terminals on the web with organization around it.
I forked VibeTunnel and turned it into a Next app and added workspaces with memory and turned it into a software factory which is making open-source alternatives for me while I sleep. I call it VibeGhost and will be launching it soon[2].
Why are you wasting households worth of electricity, and money, while people in this world starve so you can copy perfectly fine open source projects? You llm people have lost the plot.
Frankly I don't know a single person who does all this extra meta-agentic customization that gets anything done. You all are like the people who do nvim configurations all day and think they're being productive.
Yes and Opensource.Builders is a directory of open-source alternatives where I post the ones I build as well. It's different than other open source directories since we track features in the code instead of just arbitrarily saying one thing is an open source alternative to another.
For Openship, the end goal is a decentralized marketplace.
I don't understand herdr, can you explain it to me? I've tried it, but I don't understand what it gives me over tmux other than the agent sidebar. But people seem excited about it so I feel like I am missing something.
It's built for ai agents, tmux works but isn't designed for an ai workflow. Herdr is also very well thought out, not just the design/approach but also the interaction and mouse support, responsive support, etc. I had been using tmux, switched and haven't looked back.
I'm sorry but I am still confused. What specifically does herdr give me over tmux? "It is designed for agents" is just marketing speech, it means nothing. Ok, it has mouse support, fine, I don't care about that one but I can see how it's useful to some people. That has nothing to do with agents though. zellij also has a better user experience than tmux, so you could just use that or any of the other dozen multiplexers.
I understand it has the agent pane on the left that tells you what is running but... that's it?
IME yes that’s basically it. Other features haven’t really been significant value add for me. Some of the keybindings are different in minor ways. It has some mouse support but I have found that it doesn’t work well with certain apps/selections (eg: less).
It’s fine.
When running many agents something like the “idle/working workstreams” gutter is honestly helpful though.
Realistically, what I use about its agent stuff is:
- reliable notification pings either via what your terminal app uses (e.g., ghostty's) or system or just within herdr only
- if absolutely necessary, be able to tell agent sessions to observe and run commands on a herdr pane (security beware, for obvious reasons)
- herdr --remote which is basically a quick SSH -> attach to herdr on a remote
- prefix+g (equivalent to prefix+w in tmux) presents itself nicer, has binds for agent state filtering and its /search imho is mildly nicer than tmux's
Arguably, you can have the same points in others if you know how to configure tmux or zellij already, so if you're comfortable with that then you really don't have to use herdr.
There is a cross platform terminal notification cli that I used to vibe code notifications in like 5minutes and I have traffic light indicators on my tmux panes showing when an agent is waiting. The other things are also all possible. An agent is super happy to remote control tmux, it knows all the commands!
Yep, I did similar stuff too! Used something like ntfy to push notifs to an Android or just whatever commands are available on the OS you're in (e.g., `notify-send`). And for state reads herdr has `herdr pane read` while you can happily accomplish similar results with `tmux capture-pane` or similar.
> It's built for ai agents, tmux works but isn't designed for an ai workflow
So an opportunity to learn the Bitter Lesson [1].
If tmux is good enough for people today, it should be good enough for agets tomorrow. That gap might comprise a beachhead. But you'd better scramble off the shores onto something more defensible fast.
You say this like there's no value in a transitional technology. Yes, tmux should be good enough for agents tomorrow. But here we are, today.
Also, herdr is just an open source project with no VC capital behind it. So I don't think it needs to scramble to something more defensible. It can live a happy life pleasing users and then fade into obsolescence.
> Yes, tmux should be good enough for agents tomorrow. But here we are, today.
tmux is good enough for agents today. they're great at driving it, they're great at customizing it, what's the problem people have with it? i am confused.
It also doesn't have copy-paste buffers, which makes me sad. Relies on OSC52 support / system clipboards - and when you are 3 emulators / tunnels deep into a connection - rarely works.
I don't really get it either. I installed it to try it out, but I still don't understand why it's getting so much attention. I don't even use tmux. My window manager already gives me workspaces, splits, and tiling, so I don't need those features there. I also prefer focusing on a single project instead of juggling five at once. And I don't really care about notifications. I just switch back to the relevant workspace and check on things when I want to. So apart from the agent sidebar, I'm not seeing what problem it solves for me either.
you miss the multiplexer part. multiplexers are awesome if you have them on a persistent machine like a server you SSH into. To me herdr feels more like a modern alternative to tmux or zellij with the agent features being a nice add on.
I rebuild herdr from master every few days to gauge the direction it’s moving in.
What herdr gets right over zellij:
- Default keybinds don’t conflict with helix. Even the leader key mode in zellij keeps alt-bindings around. Herdr keeps things nicely tucked away.
- There’s beta support for the kitty image protocol. Three years on, we’re still waiting in zellij.
- Notifications get passed correctly through to the terminal.
As for herdr’s killer feature, agent status monitoring, there is apparently a zellij plugin.
Big win for zellij: the docs and code feel human. By contrast, herdr’s docs have all the tells of a vibe coded project. Not to say the maintainer hasn’t put care into it! But I’m getting burned out on LLM docs.
I started to use tmux-claude-session-manager (https://github.com/craftzdog/tmux-claude-session-manager) in tmux, to have a pop-up to see all active sessions. I don't have many in parallel, so usually I don't even need, but if I'm lost or forgot one, it's really helpful.
It workss a lot better for me especially copy paste which was always flakey af for me in tmux no matter what plugin i tried. 2 dimensions of panel amalgamation is suprisingly beneficial to my work flow organization too. The ai m(nitors would be useful if i cared about that. Herdr spreader plugin gives me tmuxp like behavipur especially with the herdinator.sh script currently in issues. Overall a big improvement over tmux without the bloatey slow feeling of zellij
For now I didn't find anything that really works better than using termux on android or echo on ipad, ssh into my desktop with tailscale where I have a tmux session I can attach to. "Input" seems to be the biggest struggle for me versus a normal desktop+keyboard setup. On ipad I use a nuphy bluetooth keyboard which works pretty well and on android I use FUTO Keyboard with voice input.
Overall I think I don't even want to start coding too much on the go with a setup like this but it's nice to have options :)
Pardon the plug, but I thought I'd point out that I think SciCommander [1], or the ideas behind it, could be very relevant for this stack.
It does capture a provenance graph for any ad-hoc shell commands executed in the shell mode, or if prepended by `sci run`, by tracing all new files created from commands, and creating an accompanying json file for every output with metadata, which can later be assembled into a graph specific to any output file, using the `sci tohtml` or `sci toshell` commands (producing an HTML report with an SVG graph, or a reproducing shell script, respecively).
I'm quite bullish of the possibilities with this approach.
And, this was in fact also born out of the thinking to "rip apart" workflow tools, and build them up again using small, well-defined tools that do one thing well.
These tools all assume you have machines to run the agents on. But for parallel agents I'm pretty convinced you want each agent on its own isolated devbox running your dev environment (not e.g. worktrees on one box) - which isn't trivial to set up and manage.
I'm working this with https://boxes.dev - a workspace for launching and managing claude + codex sessions, each running in its own cloud devbox.
We launched with a desktop app but have gotten a lot of pull for terminal-driven workflows, so have a TUI as well. It's interesting - when the Codex desktop app launched I was so sure that GUI is the future for coding agents (it's just a chat!). But turns out there's no killing the CLI
Running on a Cloudbox has its own set of problems. Some projects need desktop GUI tools (particularly desktop apps themselves, but some may also want these for profilers / debuggers etc). Some projects need USB. Even if you don't need any of those, you need to figure out what to do about build caches, package manager environments, credentials / secrets, VPN config, shell customizations, and those are just a few things that come to mind.
I do like having a permanent, remote workbox, but am a lot less keen on the idea of ephemeral boxes unless you're a company willing to invest into that infra.
I stopped running Claude on the terminal and use only the desktop app now. It had lots of advantages in my opinion. The terminal is really limited unfortunately, don’t know why so many devs still stick to it, and I used it for 30 years.
I'm using Hermes but these should apply to any agent that has both TUI and GUI versions. The GUI version will have:
- drag and drop
- show document type, icon and filename
- inline images
- variable fonts, esp. monospace for code blocks
So GUI is mainly about readability. CLI works fine too but is inherently limited. I think GUI agents will keep pushing further in information layout, rendering, retrieval and interactivity. We're just at the beginning of it.
Even more basic stuff like copy and paste, which works like everywhere else except the terminal. Can you paste something in the middle of what you already typed in your terminal? Not in mine. It can highlight the stuff as you type it , though some terminals can also do that somewhat. It has a list of my sessions so I don’t need to have lots of terminals open or juggle them with tmux and stuff like that. I can actually click on a command to see its output and expand individually thinking sections and so on. I can review code on a side bar instead of losing the text box I am writing on. There’s probably hundreds of more advantages you must really make an effort to not see.
The only advantage of the terminal is that it’s easier to use on remote machines. I can’t think of anything else, even the usual benefits of composing commands is not relevant for a CLI like Claude Code.
This reminds me somewhat of OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, ... [1]. You can paste an Excel chart into a Word document and if you update the data in Excel, the chart in Word will update. You can edit the chart in Word using the Excel UI because you are essentially running an Excel instance inside of Word. You can interact with Excel through an API, no need for a human. But it is painful, you can probably imagine the kind of API you need in order to be able to do all the things you can do with the Excel UI.
The idea is amazing, making this work consistently requires effort, and a lot of it. And as only a few applications invested this effort, it only works with a few applications and never really took off outside of Microsoft. I think this used to work with WordPad and maybe even Notepad but it no longer does, you just get an image instead of the chart object in WordPad and nothing at all in Notepad. It is a dying technology.
I had a similar wincing reaction to the expressed idea of wanting to converge output, control, and interaction under a terminal muxer in today's wacky world.
But that's because today's world is forcing us towards overwhelming risk management and compliance systems like NIST 800-53 and friends. If anything, these mechanisms are being drawn, quartered, and spread to the opposite corners of the Earth.
Control via configuration management systems with configuration drift detection etc. Outputs and diagnostics via monitoring, logging, audit, and accountability systems. Authorization systems with extreme least privilege, draconian rules for privileged role assumption. Interaction removed from the entire operations plane, so it only exists in some application domain concepts as a sort of ship in a bottle, which eventually perversely recurses into the same mindset for domains with interesting content and user roles.
Lots of access path restrictions intentionally limiting which usage scenario is available in which combination to which user type from which locale with which client device.
So the idea of flexible and convenient fusion of many different IO and control paths into a portable and remotely attachable terminal UX seems like the complete antithesis..?
They can at least deliver baseline value, because it's all text-based. Do agree that it'll become more complex, when/if they decide to create custom protocols.
Meta, won't comment on the site, won't click. I'm fed up with this category of click baity titles that are designed to be enigmatic rather than informative.
The guideline do not mention this, apart maybe from:
If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
I'd prefer HN if we made it a habit to editorialize such titles consisting solely of a Domainname or a single word.
that's kinda the point -- titles on HN usually indicate the sort of content that's behind clicking through, and whether it might be something interesting to the prospective reader. this one doesn't because it's the name of the company.
I clicked on the link and read the page, but I still don't have the faintest idea what a "multiplexer for all work" is, or why I want one. The more I read about it, the less I understand about it. Guess I'm not the target audience. At least I know that now, after several minutes of reading and head-scratching.
I almost get tmux -- although I still don't understand why it's better than simply opening multiple terminal window instances like I've always done in Windows -- but I'm struggling to see how the concept of terminal multiplexing applies elsewhere.
Same, at first, I thought it would be something like Glean for enterprise information joining to follow feature delivery or something and then I saw terminal and I gave up.
Not really; not without understanding what am I missing. Why does Linux need a "multiplexer for all work," while Windows either already has one, doesn't need one, or couldn't use one?
Except you don't need a multiplexer for that. Essentially all modern terminals have tabs. Many have split-screen. Even windows ships with a half-decent terminal with tabs and multiple panes by default now!
A multiplexer's job is to do the whole multiple tabs/panes/windows thing independently of the terminal itself, but (a) the UX for eg. tmux is so much worse than that of a good terminal UI, and (b) you only need that if you plan on connecting remotely (see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108483).
With tux the biggest difference and gain is that you can detach and resume the terminal session, leaving processes running on the "server" (where tmux was initially started) even if your "client" disconnects. On top of this, you can have multiple terminals inside the same session.
Yes, except if you launch a process with nohup, then close your terminal and open a new one how do you reconnect to it? I assume there's a way to do it but I don't know how (probably someone with more unix-fu will reply), plus you can't see the previous output. Whereas with screen/tmux you can just pop it open again and see the whole session.
By default, SIGHUP has no signal handler, and so a process that receives it will exit. The kernel should send SIGHUP to all child processes when you quit the shell session or the terminal file (pty/tty) is closed. Processes trying to write to a nonexistent terminal may be terminated by SIGPIPE.
So you launch a process with nohup(1). This puts SIGHUP and others on ignore status, redirects output to a file, and then executes your process. This is similar to how a daemon starts, when it explicitly dissociates from any terminal device.
With tmux or screen, a layer of pseudo-ttys (ptys) is created, and process groups are managed, so your terminal's pty is only connected to the master tmux process, and each subprocess/window is assigned a new pty and process group of its own, as if you had remotely logged in to each shell.
So tmux is now handling SIGHUP and can detect when your terminal or session closes out. The persistence of subprocesses comes from the fact that they aren't receiving SIGHUP and that they are still associated with pty, as tmux is running "daemonized" until you reattach.
Tmux is good because:
1) sessions stay running if you disconnect
2) window management - you can split your screen, have an octobox a-la redzone style, and focus/unfocus etc.
This is based on developing on a remote server - but even locally, I find it invaluable. Multiple terminal windows are fine, but some times you want multiple windows. Even in a pre-ai world, you might want to run a process, see the code, edit, and maybe have htop or something like that. If you ever NEED multiple terminal windows for the same thing, tmux is really the answer.
One reason I find it hard to grasp is that when I work on Windows, it's almost always through RDP or VNC. There is never any question of a terminal (or a process launched from it) staying open between login sessions, because it never depended on any particular connection to begin with. It's just there, on the desktop, which might stay up for months before I need to connect to it again. Any terminals or other processes I launch on that system will be there until I close them intentionally, or until Microsoft decides to reboot the system without my permission.
So when I dip my toes into the Linux world, the first thing I do (or rather ask an LLM harness to do, being much less familiar with Linux than I am with Windows) is set up an RDP host. That way I can follow the same basic workflow on both OSes. I don't need to do anything special with terminal windows.
I guess if I were running truly headless systems that don't even have a VGA frame buffer, I'd be more interested in multiplexing. But so far I haven't had to do that, and would probably resist it because a persistent desktop strikes me as better in general than letting applications including terminals worry about their own lifetimes.
Tmux only makes sense if you’re connecting remotely in some form or another. Otherwise, it’s just terminal windows/tabs with extra steps. Even if your terminal integrates with tmux like iterm2 does (where local tabs become tmux tabs, local windows become tmux windows, etc), it doesn’t really mean much if it’s all local anyway.
The usual arguments make no sense if you’re only on your local machine:
- You can detach the session: well yeah, I can minimize the terminal window too.
- You can have multiple tabs/windows in a session: yup, same with my window manager
- You can keep multiple sessions and attach/detach from them whenever: I can do that with multiple desktops in my window manager
And so on.
But, once you want to do all of this on a remote server, it all makes sense: putting my laptop to sleep shouldn’t end the session on the server. If I get disconnected for some reason, I should be able to reattach and resume it if I reconnect. So then you have the session run on the server and you only “attach” to it when you connect, and if your terminal has good integration, new tabs become new tmux tabs etc… it’s all transparent.
It’s also useful if you’re running a session locally but anticipate wanting to attach to it from somewhere else: if your terminal session is tmux from the start, you can transparently attach to it from another machine too.
But, if you’re just dealing with one machine, who cares, just skip the multiplexer. (It’s literally not “multi” plexing if there’s only one client!)
Another thing worth mentioning is that if your terminal doesnt have good tmux integration, and you’re only running locally anyway, your life is strictly worse off with tmux: scrolling is a horribly broken hack, buffer search sucks, copy/paste never works, switching open terminals is an awkward ctrl+b contortion, etc. No amount of fiddling with your tmux config is going to make the UX as good as a decent terminal has, and I will die on this hill. :-)
website is very vague - not useful content - no information, some gradient box without any content, team thats it. Super annoying landing page. Even if HN title is not descriptive the website is not helping to figure out what this is all about.
NSA and other companies historically had you jumping hoops and writing mini-exploits to be able to see the email you're supposed to send your resume to.
The ssh thing is really fun, but I wish they had another way to view the openings. I'm on a connection with massive latency at the moment and it's pretty horrible UX in this case
While that might be tongue-in-cheek, no company I have ever worked at has had a better work/life balance than the earliest days of HashiCorp (low tens of people) when Mitchell was the CEO.
I must admit that I paused before hitting enter on that command and thought to myself, "Maybe I should download Ghostty and open it with that as a virtue signal." :-)
I recommend 'ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no superlogical.jobs` if you have a public key and want to stay anonymous (beyond revealing your IP).
Why? Because if you use SSH to connect to connect to GitHub, your SSH public key
is published at https://github.com/<username>.keys so an SSH server to which you connect could do a reverse lookup.
This is the reason why my ~/.ssh/config has those 2 lines at the end:
Thanks for the tip! Yeah, I think Mitchell Hashimoto (ssh CLI command came from his new company's official site) can be trusted here. If they were doing Github pub key harvesting for analytics though, it would be a interesting tracking pixel equivalent!
My first thought was that they have several people who seem like they'll expect very serious compensation but no actual product, then I noticed they already seem to have a whole bunch of VC backers. I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little jealous of people who can make a flashy vaporware pitch deck and ride the VC gravy train.
Yes and they don't mention any language at all for Windows. Just "native", which is pretty much a philosophical question for that platform. I guess that means the founders have all avoided that platform their entire lives - which makes perfect sense but it means they have to trust their first engineering hire to make every consequential decision.
Personally I'd recommend they hire someone who has done native windows like its 2001 and is willing to use Zig.
Zig has bindings for Win32, etc., so a competent Windows developer should be as comfortable using that as C, C++, or whatever else people write Windows programs in these days. (At some point, it was intended that Windows programs would be written in Pascal, but that never caught on.)
Most of the time when I need to touch a Windows program I'm dealing with the Telegram desktop client which is C++ and a mixture of Qt and "native" Windows. (Well, that, and when I have to touch an ancient C# code base which requires doing the equivalent of archeology in order to get all of its dependent libraries to work.)
He says here that they have a direct Tailscale integration of the type that requires using the `tsnet` package, which is Go. Or at least would pull in the Go runtime as part of a shared library.
Interesting choice because tailscale is not free. Building in a paid third-party service is a questionable decision.
They better acquire it, if their product catches on.
Building with wireguard directly instead of tailscale would have been my choice, but of course it requires more plumbing.VC money means they gotta move fast.
But as a potential user, I won't pay for tailscale just to use their product.
There is nothing wrong with tailscale, it's just a dependency that can cost money charged by a third-party, so their product is less self-sovereign because it depends on tailscale keeping up a free tier.
I feel like the main benefit of such a thing would be centralization. Part of the issue with the terminal ecosystem is precisely that everything's so fragmented and everybody needs to support arcane terminal protocols and wrap a billion wrappers around each other. The easiest way to solve this is to be a definer yourself rather than an integrator, which I think is what this is trying to be. If we could actually have standardized terminal extensions in one place (you'd be surprised how many extension codes there are in terminal land) that has a different semantics not from the 80s, but still captures the terminal experience, that would be great.
The 'cleanest' experience I've got for what I want is mosh + tmux and even that has issues (no block cursor for example).
If superlogical's ultimate goal is to revamp the Linux developer ecosystem, all for it. Am potentially worried long term about these kinds of strategies from a political point of view but as long as things stay open source and stay as local dev tools, its fine.
Just look at the comments, everybody is like "look I built the same thing" LLM people have fried their ability to be original, its kind of nice knowing all my competition in tech has no original thought anymore.
Yeah I have my own forks for it, it's just annoying since usually I want to just install things on a machine and just "have it work". Mosh is also extra annoying because it depends on ssh and libcrypto stuff, which I have not found working with my current "install all my deps on a machine and run" workflow yet (e.g. from what I understand you basically have to compile from source for certain things that touch ssh and security; I wasn't able to get a portable git install either, instead I just trust the systemwide one and don't use old distributions).
I've found that I'm making compromises that keep integration with existing systems minimal at the cost of perfect aesthetics :(
> Location Though the team has spent many years scaling remote-first companies and is currently remote, we are hiring specifically in Los Angeles, London, and New York, with an expectation for a flexible in-office schedule as we build our presence in each region.
I always get a "lifestyle business" vibe when tech companies are based in LA or NY. When you're a seasoned veteran you'd prefer to live in a larger, more fun city, even though tech is concentrated in the Bay Area
Or you want to hire the kind of seasoned veterans who want to live in those cities. Often later-career, families, looking for exposure to more than just a thriving tech scene.
I don’t think that’s a parsimonious explanation in a post-COVID world. It seems equally if not more likely that talent is more distributed, and people find fewer reasons to relocate into the Bay Area (in terms of career progression, etc.)
(This is not, in my mind, either a good or a bad thing.)
That's not the original meaning of a "lifestyle business" anyways, which is more like a business that makes enough (to its owners, nothing to do with the employees) for them to maintain their desired lifestyle, like maybe a few million in revenue or whatever, but can't / won't be scaled beyond that because their lifestyle is already well supported by the current business growth / volume / revenue so they have no interest on blitzscaling, taking VC money, and running the perpetual growth treadmill or because the business is already topped-up and won't support further scaling (its not always a choice)
Yes, indeed, although i think in this case it was just signalling how not being "SF focused" might be seen as a lack of ambition or whatever in such VC contexts or something and thus the exaggerated comparison to it being a lifestyle business merely due to the location requirements on ny/la (nicer cities to live in, maybe, than SF, or whatever)
i think just michael is based on LA, so he prefers having the offices near his home (has kids, etc), and has enough FU money to not need to let the VC's dictate where the HQ's are located at.
I guess also they dont love the idea of managing people remotely for a small startup/first hires, although im sure for the right person they wouldn't really care (or usually this is how it goes on most small companies/startups)
"lifestyle business" is sometimes used as a derogatory term to describe setting up a corporation for a hobby that is not really meant to be profitable.
In VC circles, "lifestyle business" refers to a business that is profitable but has no plans for scaled up growth and instead basically exists to provide a job to its owner or founder that lets them live a lifestyle they like, including the job itself.
Funny how just 3-4 years ago on this forum people were openly prognosticating about how the era of fully remote work was here to stay and the centre of gravity of investment no longer had to be SV and YCombinator was running fully remote sessions, etc. etc.
And here we now have people saying stuff like this again.
Also, long live the "lifestyle business" if it means people just making businesses that bring in non-exponential but justifiable and sustainable income ... like, y'know, a business is supposed to. Good grief.
Another example of the galaxy brain people who like employees to go to an office but then are happy to have offices all over the world, some of which have 8 hours of timezone difference.
Are they the champions of collaboration or the champions of company culture?
Invisible until moused over, or scrolled by other means. Barely visible even then. In the wrong place. It may be "just styled", but it's certainly not fine.
I've spend the last ~20 years inside tmux/vim — and the last month almost exclusively in the Codex desktop app, and increasingly am just doing remote control from the ChatGPT app on my phone.
Ghostty rocks and it brings me no pleasure to say this, but it seems unclear how much longer this world will exist?
Their intention is to let you live inside, well, Superlogical which can run on your Mac or Windows desktop, and, eventually, on your phone, too.
I still regularly need to edit text files and use nvim for that. Sometimes I even use it to edit a prompt. I like to prompt my system by writing .md files to help get through the planning phase, and then I like to edit the generated todo list.
> Though the team has spent many years scaling remote-first companies and is currently remote, we are hiring specifically in Los Angeles, London, and New York, with an expectation for a
flexible in-office schedule as we build our presence in each region.
To make it more relevant: right now I mostly rely on tmux. Before that I’ve been a long time user of screen (irssi over ssh people know this play). Looking forward to this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_returns_of_Donald_Trump
"Trump paid no net federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years of the past two decades. After the refund, Trump had an average tax bill of $1.4 million per year over the 18 years.[52][176] In 2016, Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax, and in 2017, he paid another $750 in federal income tax."
If there was an unequal vote, I am pretty sure rich people would want votes as heavy as possible.
If you read it again you will notice that technically he thinks that, to satisfy those who believe the wealthy don't pay tax, Canada could use a system to encourage the wealthy to claim income, where that is incentivized by being able to vote. Often the wealthy have no need for income as they already have so much wealth and can easily borrow against that wealth as cash needs present themselves. It is believed (at least as far as the thread went) that the wealthy currently don't pay tax, and thus would be unable to vote, or their vote would count for little, under the proposed since they don't have sufficient income to qualify.
That would be true if he advocated for votes according to effective taxation rate or something similar. He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember, which is a rounding error to his income class.
Instead, he makes sure to include the idea of stripping low-income people of all voting rights.
Not at all. The idea is that his class claim very little income, if any income. His income class is ~$0 (or believed to be, at least). You can certainly make an argument that the claim isn't true, that the ultra-wealthy are actually already paying huge sums in income tax, but then you cannot take the thread out of context. It was clearly directed at those who believe the wealthy pay no income tax. It literally says so. Did you skip step one and not go back to read it again?
> He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember
You are correct, approximately, but there would have been no need to remember given step one, so that was clearly ignored. Why? What is the purpose of replying without even reading the comment you are replying to?
Lutke's own post was about pension = no votes, which I identify as the thing he decided to actually spent time on. His other tweet is a Musk-like "Good idea" reply to someone else's proposal regarding tax brackets, no?
I don't think memory fails me on the main points. If you think ranking the same read facts differently from you means faulty reading, I don't really owe you the labor of explaining where that fails.
> His other tweet is a Musk-like "Good idea" reply to someone else's proposal regarding tax brackets, no?
Yes, that is the one we are talking about. The pension comment was posted earlier and isn't directly applicable to the discussion taking place.
The other comment did happen, to be sure. I guess we can change the subject if you want to. The comment that came prior to it asserted that the only way to solve the housing crisis is to take the power away from those who most participate in local government (i.e. retired people). To which Tobi suggested that one way to address that is to allow one to choose power or a pension, but not both, suggesting that pensioners have become dependents and thus no longer have any real stake in the future of a locality.
Which certainly isn't a novel idea. I've heard the same thing many times from people who are ostensibly poor. Many honestly believe that retirees (a.k.a. boomers) who "got theirs" are why housing is out of their reach. You could make a good case that Tobi was trying to play up "I'm just like the little guy" when he isn't actually, but if that is the case, what is our takeaway from that?
Step one means fuck-all nothing with a cap of $800K. Its not as if billionaires truly pay $0 in tax. $800K is approximately $0 to a billionaire so they'd all just pay that.
Exactly. Which means the plan is automatically invalidated by its own design. It literally states that it exists only to appease those who believe that the wealthy don't pay tax, which is unnecessary as the wealthy already do pay tax. I guess that's what makes it a good plan. It is already in effect!
Why would they care? The ultra-wealthy impact election through donations, which is many order of magnitudes more impactful than their personal ballot, even if you were to give them 10x weight.
Elon Musk impact on the U.S. election wasn't because he drove to the booth.
Franklin also supported universal male suffrage, wrote Pennsulvania’s 1776 constitution which adopted universal male suffrage, and condemned property requirements for the franchise, reportedly arguing:
“Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars, and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers — but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass.”
“Didn’t forbid”, if referring to the framers of the Constitution, is a bit of an understatement, given that they created multiple layers of protection to prevent dismantling slavery at the federal level into the future.
The founding fathers, the framers (a different and later group, though the two overlap and are often conflated) and original states had a variety of (and evolving in some cases between the Founding and the Constitution) opinions on the issue; some (Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, notably, the latter also the primary author of PA’s 1776 Constitution which also adopted this position at the state level) were in favor of universal male suffrage.
Along with a myriad of different controversies. Just searching his name will bring up many articles about his chronically online Elon Musk wannabe takes.
I found this just when I googled his name plus controversy
> Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke faced fierce online backlash in July 2026 after endorsing a social media proposal for a tax-tiered voting system that would strip voting rights from non-taxpayers and give multiple votes to high-income earners.
but if we go as far as to say
> If it’s touched by Tobias Lütke, I’m out.
does it mean control or sponsored, for example ladybird web browser...
That vague posting is a bit frustrating to be honest.
Are you talking about the fact they do not accept pull requests? If yes, they had good reasons for doing so, LLMs make it really time consuming and exhausting to manage an open source community, I completely understand why they decided to stop accepting PRs for now
He came to Canada as an immigrant, made some buck and now unashamedly calls 'idiots' the very people that built the communities where he lives. The guy is a complete POS.
Thanks for surfacing this. As another user says below, Mitchell had more leeway in choosing his investors than most anyone. His is a dispiriting choice.
in this case mitchell is an exited founder with a net worth of over $1B so he can be choosier than almost anyone in this regard. Deeply disappointing he is taking money from Guillermo
things look different from Billionaire Island than they do to us plebs down here. it's crazy to expect such people to do the "right" thing, they're too far gone.
They're basically building in one layer what a lot of people are using multiple different apps for currently. Exactly as another commenter said, it's sort of a mix between herdr and proper remote access.
I use pi as my primary harness and then Claude code and Codex (but with the desktop app for some very specific things)
The last two have remote capability with their own app. With pi, you have extensions that can do remote access, but you still end up with three different places to look to get remote access properly from your phone.
People also use tmux and Zellij and any other number of combinations of different apps combined with some kind of remote access, but nothing that's unified and does everything all at once in one place. I feel like that's a good problem to solve if you can do it better.
It doesn't solve the fundamental problem however of inverting the flow from one human to many agents to many agents to one agent to one human.
Maybe I just missed the boat on hashicorp and similar solutioning, but I find a lot of the solutions for working with multiple systems using an intermediary shared language, such as terraform, end up obfuscating the problems they intend to solve and result in people who deal with and support those systems on a daily basis having very little understanding of how to interact and troubleshoot the core infra that is being built up with those tools.
Yes, building those solutions requires a lot of expertise, but I've never found the tools to be worth engaging with over just using what the standard platform tools they abstract away were replacing. Then you add in the economic rug-pull scenarios that have happened when utilizing software like this and I wonder why everyone hops on the bandwagon so easily.
What is the company they're building trying to solve that system maintainers can't already do? Isn't this just rebuilding OS windowing?
There is value in abstracting the underlying generic systems into more context-relevant primitives for people who just want to get shit done in that context.
Why not meet people where they are at?
If this product isn't valuable, then it will fail. I suspect it will not fail.
I get that premise, I guess I've just been around a lot of bad engineers that use these types of tools as crutches but can't actually articulate or diagnose problems well. They just regurgitate the syntax like it's a magic spell.
We're talking about abstracting generic OS windowing/multiplexing for what sounds like an agent-based development workflow modality where you're referring to what's happening in the panes/tabs/windows instead of the containers themselves.
Looking really cynically, it does seem like it might transition into some kind of cloud-development situation. Your "one access to all development" is one ssh away from our mega 24/7 online compute farm, since we need to keep the sessions persistent. But you can access anything you want!
At the risk of sounding like a booster, I have noodled over whether this is a place that AI can legitimately provide some improvements. It's harder than just waving an AI at the problem, which is why we don't really have this yet. But one of the major issues with the intermediary language you're talking about is the rigidity of conventionally-applied programming. AI is a bit more flexible and gooey and more able to function as duct tape and bailing wire... but that does come with several tradeoffs of its own that need to be mitigated to some degree.
As a specific example of this, I've been using emacs since about 1997, but it's only this year that I've started down this sort of "integrate everything" road that it promises, because I've never wanted to learn emacs' specific Lisp variant that is used nowhere else. But now with AI I've done more emacs extensions that are providing real value to me than I have in the last... ever. About my previous limit was reifying a keyboard macro into a command, which still isn't really programming emacs.
The ability to indicate "intent" in a way that computers can actually process it as "intent" might change the calculus enough to make this more possible than it used to be in the past.
But those tradeoffs are real. Non-determinism is a problem. Difficulty in knowing what the AI is doing unless you're staring at its output, and even the ability to conceivably monitor an AI's output is only a transient thing we have at the moment, they'll speed up past our ability to monitor them at all soon enough. But it's at least a new area that can be explored and there may be solutions to some problems in there we couldn't reach before.
Agent orchestrators are the IDE dream repackaged. IDEs never really took off, excepting lock-in/monolopolization (Visual Studio, Xcode). They never lived up to the grand vision of the likes of Alan Kay. IDEs of today are still basically just text editors with a file explorer. Agent orchestrators seem similar. The vision is grand but the implementation is just tabbed terminals.
I think IDEs took off plenty well, but several got frozen in time.
Visual Studio as the IDE for building windows client apps, especially WinForms, was and still is a genuinely incredible and productive experience. The ease of which you could click-and-drag a UI, context switch to logic in the code behind the forms, wire up a web service backend, share domain models and have navigation and search tools understand all of it was great. And the TFS integration was quite good too. You really only had to leave VS to do database work or administer some IIS pools.
Unfortunately, it couldn't keep up with the rest of the dev world. "Server Explorer" morphed to include your Azure VMs but froze for 30s each time you opened it. Docker tools came in super late, most Azure services didn't really have a VS tooling experience. The "right click publish" workflow meant for small systems never figured out how to graduate to real-world needs across many teams. Developers had to learn how to use many other tools for modern stuff, and so VS became far less of a center of gravity, often to their annoyance.
I think they definitely have the IDE vision in mind and are trying to move off of terminals, based on two parts of the original article
> so you can close the application, reconnect from another device, and pick up exactly where you left off.
I think this is the remote IDE development dream that no one could quite get right, partly because there wasn't enough reason to run things on a 24/7 device. I think with coding agents that can run in the background this changes.
> Sessions can be accessed through the web and native macOS/iOS applications, and sharing a live session with other people is built in from the start.
I'd really like to point out that "Sharing a live session" is horrible UX for a terminal multiplexer because the terminal has to be the same size (# of rows/cols) on all viewers' screens, and some of these viewers may be on a phone and others on a laptop. Believe it, I tried myself and there's no good way around the problem.
What is interesting is that they added this sentence anyway. This tells me that their long-term endgame is not the terminal. They're most likely trying to build a GUI-based agent IDE and then eventually expand to other work (per their headline of being the "multiplexer for all work") as it all gets more and more agent-based anyways. Well, they're not alone in having that vision.
Do you think the future is more sophisticated agent management, or will tooling increasingly fall away to a single chat session with an executive agent of sorts?
There are plenty industry-specific niche IDEs that you probably never heard of that make up a significant part of many companies product offering.
Jetbrains is valued around $7bil and their business is almost exclusively in IDEs.
Wolfram Research is valued probably around $100mil and their business also mostly consists of an IDE product.
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With AI, I think the future of IDEs will be very split. A lot less work will happen in IDEs (in terms of LOC), but at the same time, I think AI will allow for a more sophisticated build-out of IDEs, so e.g. debug experiences will become a lot richer.
Serious question: if one were willing to give up on curses, isn’t Emacs/elisp providing the best multiplexing system available to humankind? And conceptually, why would agents ever need to depend on curses?
Concretely, Emacs/elisp isn't particularly great for handling the newer terminal protocols that allow things like Shift+Enter, Ctrl+Space, etc., along with high colour support or better handling of the alt/meta/⌥ key. Hence why the flurry of new terminal emulators.
The other problem is it does have to be hosted somewhere, and if you run it locally, it goes away when you close your laptop. If you run it remotely, you have the latency to the remote site. I suspect Superlogical is going to find a way to fix this problem.
I've wondered this myself. I stuck with iTerm2 for a really long time but recently switched to Ghostty. Ghostty definitely seems to renders faster (I say "seems to" because I didn't benchmark or anything).
I don't actually use a multiplexer. I'm not sure I understand the use case when most terminal emulators supports tabs + windows (like iTerm2 does). Or you could just launch multiple windows and use your OS's window manager to "multiplex". Are the terminals connected in some way that I'm missing?
Regardless, I think Ghostty is a reminder that you can win in a space that's crowded. There's probably a lot of widely used software that would get dropped en masse immediately if someone had the guts to make a better alternative.
Typically, the benefit of the mux over just more windows or tabs is the ability to detach sessions from a term and have them continue to run. But yea, the “split a term window into multiple terms” doesn’t have quite as much value in a world of lots of tabs. That said, you can do it under program control on the remote host, so it does save remote login overhead, etc. But for local, less value.
If you like terminals and tmux, can I suggest you spend a few hours playing with herdr? It clicked for me in a way that a lot of other orchestrators didn't.
Multiplexers have a lot of little papercuts and limitations when you want consistent and native-to-the-OS behavior to flow all the way between the OS and the apps and connections in the multiplexers. For example, gesture scrolling in a tmux/zellij pane is hard because the right events don't flow through. It's an itch to scratch like designing a good terminal lib (like ghostty.)
And then, there's all the unifying and smoothing out of data connections--I imagine they'll be a lot to make sure that, e.g., an ssh session or a Claude code session in a pane can be seamlessly reconnected or never drop when the pane is closed. This takes a lot of hacking to make look seamless in most setups right now.
Like mitchell, I write a lot of software around multiplexers, and I've thought about making something similar, but I don't have quite the same level of personal wealth or angel investor connections. :)
herdr and mosh are a couple of reference points for this, there are others.
Yes, but you can't, for example, transfer momentum vectors through zellij to the app.
If the app is offering what appears to be momentum, it's implemented its own acceleration/deceleration algorithm. That's a lot to ask of an app, and they aren't equally good.
Detecting a wide range of underlying terminal support for a CLI app is a pain and prone to errors/drift.
There are various plugins that attempt to solve this, but it'd be nice for someone to solve it once and for all, and then upstream those layers into open source as this project is promising to do.
I don't get it either. What's wrong with Terminal and tmux, screen or what have you?
I don't get the whole GPU rendering thing for ghostty either. Its a terminal emulator. It shows plain text. Why would I need GPU acceleration? I never felt "yeah, this terminal needs faster rendering".
Really exciting IMO. Many people are working on new work interfaces (e.g. Codex/Claude/Cursor, multiplayer agent spaces, unified Slack/Notion/Zoom, etc.), and I think the Superlogical vision makes sense as a competitor in the space, at least to try.
There’s clearly room to improve our existing tools.
I love how ghostty does windows/tabs/splits, but ultimately, I don't find myself using them. I find that I only have so much muscle memory in my hands, and I need to stick with one solution that works everywhere. A multiplexer let's me do this on my own machine, or if I'm SSH'd in elsewhere. Personally I use Zellij, because tmux feels like learning another vim. But I do use tmux when using tmate, because it's the simplest way I've found to share terminals.
Anyway, I'm very happy to see someone with Michell's talent entering this space. We can use more options with sane defaults and great performance.
The biggest strength to Tmux that a lot of the alternatives lack is you could make a shell script to setup your tmux instance(s) exactly as you would want, so by the time you load into it, its got all the tabs, split terminals, etc where you want them.
Sounds like something that could be done with by pulling in a few dozen Emacs extensions and writing a few thousand lines of elisp. (And one of those extensions would be the libghostty base ghostel.)
It's sort of what I'm doing already -- using emacs-server to provide portable persistent sessions on top of a bunch of terminals, agents and editor buffers.
It's a 1% effort on my part and super janky and super me-specific -- if somebody put a small fraction of the effort into it that others are putting into superlogical and the other alternatives listed here, it could be awesome....
This is like the “why not use FTP yourself” response to the YC Dropbox page.
Yes, but good, standardized developer tooling is valuable.
Postman could’ve also been a “just use CURL and dump to JSON” for example.
I actually am bullish on this. Tmux and ssh are somewhat clunky and probably under utilized by most people. I struggle to find commands, navigate sessions, see history, and so on.
Also in an “agent” based world where you might ask an agent to execute things for you, how do you manage that context well beyond just giving it its own Tmux session to drive?
It’s a good idea, and I’m surprised no one’s built it sooner.
Devs don't use Dropbox, they use git. Git is probably the poster-child example of an unfriendly interface, and yet it's the standard way for devs to share files.
Emacs is downright friendly compared to git & tmux IMO.
Care to share your setup? I'm currently working on pretty much the same thing and it's looking good so far, but having a single user makes it hard to get enough feedback.
Hmmm, it's a fairly stock emacs setup. Most of the weird/specific stuff is outside of emacs: setting up a sandbox, managing worktrees, managing disk space because each worktree can easily contain 200GiB of build artifacts, et cetera.
The Emacs parts of it are all either stock or partially or fully broken.
I've got notification support but it's broken.
I'd love to use agent-shell because it's a much better way to interact with agents than using their stupid TUI's, but it's currently broken with Claude for me and is way behind the claude TUI.
So instead I use claude-code-ide.el inside of a ghostel, but it's got a large number of friction points. Mostly due to claude's broken TUI.
Sounds like you're using LLMs correctly IMO. The entire appeal of LLMs in dev-tooling is being able to setup hyper-specific, customized workflows and have "extensions" be done by telling the LLM what to fix. For that, the smaller and more minimal the base is, the better.
The server being their server that you eventually have to a pay a subscription to use? Hmm..
Also, interesting permission problems. Are you going to allow a remote server owned by someone else have shell access to all of your computers? Are they allowed to train an LLM from all the things you type?
Funny. I started working on a similar product myself just a few days ago. I have multiple machines for multiple different purposes. Each one runs different agents (some local, some cloud), for different tasks. Different ones store different data (a NAS on one, my VMs on another, etc.). I wanted a durable layer over all of them to be able to start work on any one of them and resume on any other, and for all the disparate agents to share memory/configurations where possible, and for each node in the network to make all the others aware of its purpose (so when the NAS is online, the agents know how to connect to it and what it contains). Sadly no VC funding for me, building it on my lonesome :)
Still exploring different options but at the moment I run a daemon on each node that connects via iroh to link the nodes (and NAT traversal). Once the link is established the nodes share data via a Raft-based datastore. I can launch a TUI client on any machine. This presents a chat interface like a typical LLM harness. From here I can configure which model I want to use, how the model is executed and on which node (for example I can use Ollama on machine A to serve a model that’s running on machine B, but executing commands via this system on machine C). Each daemon then acts like a typical LLM harness, but headless. So the commands and tool calls are streamed into the shared store and finally end up in my TUI. Since all the state is in the distributed store I can pick up the progress wherever I want, as long as there’s a node running there.
Still a lot of big problems like latency so I’m not too happy with the current design. It’s a LOT of state to replicate, and obviously things get problematic when an agent was working on a project on machine A but then ends up on machine B which doesn’t have that project directory around at all. So the agent needs to re-orient itself to figure out what happened. Still pretty fun to play with.
This is an incredible idea. I would usually be skeptical that such an engineering-focused tool would "make it," but Mitchell Hashimoto is one of the very few people I think can pull it off.
This is going to change so many things if it starts getting adopted.
Well neither of those is backed by libghostty. They also aren't native. This multiplexer is a native application on macOS. Hopefully we see a native port for Windows and Linux too.
I love Ghostty. But I miss out on lots of its features because I use zellij exclusively to work with agents. This sounds exciting and I hope they'll choose some cliff oss license like gitbutler does
I rely on tmux, sway, and AeroSpace for my daily life, so I think multiplexers are important. It's just that they're currently fragmented, and with Chrome, we have so many tools for organizing tabs and split-screen now. It would be great if Superlogical could solve all of this.
That explains why he built sessions into libghostty instead of Ghostty itself. Looking forward to it.
I spend most of my time in the terminal and have been using tmux to manage my sessions and workspaces, mainly via sesh.
But recently, I decided to move to Kitty and use its built-in sessions instead. I built something around it as well. It’s still early, but I’m really liking this workflow so far.
I like the concept. I maintain something similar [0], a daemon-backed supervisor where each task is one command in its own PTY (builds, servers, agent sessions), rather than a persistent shell workspace.
Anybody else using Superset as your multiplexer rn? I'm finding it quite useful but wondering if there are other existing products that I should consider -- Mac Silicon: https://superset.sh/ Curious to see what Superlogical cooks up.
I've never heard of that Superset. I've used the Apache business analytics one though: https://github.com/apache/superset. Unfortunate name collision...
I have a lot of respect for Mitchellh but taking VC money for a tmux clone is wild.
As long as you are rich all the VCs will throw money at you.. fine.. but if you are rich then you don't have to take the VC money either. Just do it out of passion.
My take is that it will be tmux as a service. You will have many different sessions which will have their data stored in some central system (read: raft/etcd) and an API built on top of that for create/list/attach to sessions.
Ghostty is the client side aspect of this (the binary that actually runs on your laptop), but there will be a large backend system that the binary talks to through an API. With the API you can then also start automating sessions, for example when a metrics value trips an alert start an agent to triage with a session you can then attach to for further interrogation.
What Im not sure of is if they are going to build on top of kubernetes or not, which already provides a lot of the features necessary (etcd store, API server, workload orchestration, tenant isolation, extendable API).
This sounds awesome enough to see if they're hiring, and they are, but unfortunately only in certain areas with an expectation to be in-office with some regularity. Bummer. Exciting to see this team together, though. This is a tool that I want and think about daily.
It's a multiplexer w/ distributed state. If you know about tmux then it's basically tmux but someone else can connect to the same session w/o logging on to the same computer. I can imagine it being useful for debugging production outages b/c several people can use a single "dashboard" for coordinating their work w/o having to go back & forth on slack/zoom/etc. You can ask any chat bot to explain further if you want to look into it: https://share.google/aimode/XadkUVcvpjlYhuWmK
It’s interesting because in an ideal world he is practically building a NixOS config.
I’m pretty new to NixOS (a few months) but i could envision using Nix to declarativey configure tmux windows and panes in a dev shell. That said, Nix feels like it might still be too clunky at this point in time to quickly re-declare window and panel arrangements. But I never tried and it could be possible.
call me an optimist, but I believe that more and more things are getting more viable to do from the terminal. tools like jj remove the need in Git GUI because mental model and UX gets streamlined, and the AI craze incentivizes practically every company to create their own CLI
> For us, that means interactive work, automatic work, and production work would share one well-crafted underlying system instead of living in separate tools.
Unless this is only for the narrow band of purely local work, I would be surprised if k8s didn't play a big role in the backend solution. It is the standard "well-crafted underlying system" for automatic production work. But, it isn't strong in the interactive-work/frontend aspect or other aspects, so it certainly wouldn't be the main focus of the final product.
Random example: you want to multiplex some work across multiple (self-hosted) agents, using niche fine-tuned models. It would make good sense if those agents were automatically provisioned and deprovisioned (and isolated to your subtenant), and k8s is a great underlying system for that sort of thing.
Doesn't K8s already practically provide a layer of abstraction across all infrastructure? You might not think of it as being a session, but to the degree that it's responsible for managing scaling and failover, it kind of is.
This isn't a statement of value, I'm genuinely curious myself. In fact, I bet this new thing will probably be better.
This sounds like given a coherent structure to “I want the prod code here to change the retry policy so pending retries are held in memory in this edge layer instead of the DB writers so load can be shed more cheaply” and it will usher things in from coding, testing, filing tickets, getting prod approvals, using the deploy tools to respond the containers, smoke testing the deploy, looking at Datadog or whatever to ensure the change is having the desired effect. All in one context, the tools and dev/qa/prod systems naturally being orchestrated within the same environment/ session. K8s is just the next to last 100 meters.
Its hilarious how everyone in the comments is like "Look I built the same thing"
Ya'll really need to checkout that 15 year old talk from Peter Thiel about not building the same thing as everyone else. LLMs have destroyed problem solving, creative thinking in general. Why don't you people actually solve problems that matter and are original rather than making the equivalent of nvim configurations of the llm era?
> LLMs have destroyed problem solving, creative thinking in general.
People probably had just as many uncreative ideas before, but lacked the ability to execute on them. Remember the "idea guys" constantly looking for tech cofounders to build their "brilliant" visions? Now, LLMs have given them the ability to execute.
One of the cofounders is formerly from poolside (poolside.ai), where they produce open-weight coding models. One of their recent models, Laguna, got quite a bit of attention here on HN.
> We will build a high-quality terminal multiplexer that remains excellent at that job, even as it grows to support the second and third parts of the plan.
why this feels the next step is data collection and Ads?
This was just a pitch to VCs to collect a 10 million dollars because they don't know the difference between up and down and when say terminal multiplexer for the AI age they ask for your wire info.
The people here are a who's who of bad software. I expect horrible things. (if you haven't experienced the abomination of everything hashicorp made you should not downvote me here)
I'm sorry to take it out on this specific announcement, as it just seems to be one of many "offenders", but why are the 15 investors listed on an announcement blog post of a semi-stealth startup?
With most of them being VC or high-count angel investors, they can combined push whatever product is being built here into 200+ companies independent of whether it is good or not. What happened to the good old way of figuring out product market fit first? Is that the only way a product can succeed nowadays, or why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
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I'm excited to see what Superlogical will build, but the startup scene seems to grow more clique-y by the day.
I'm not doubting that Mitchell Hashimoto is capable of building great products with great product market fit. Quite the opposite, as the few strands of idolization that exist within me rank him as one of the best to ever do it in the dev tooling space.
I'm also not doubting that there would be tons of investors throwing themselves at him for a new venture like this.
But why, apart from forced market access would it be in his interest to take that money, given that he can nicely fund it for a few years with ~1% of his net worth if not for forced market access?
1. Accountability - even very talented people can lose motivation or get distracted. Having investors to report to helps with this.
2. Recruiting - many people would be wary of working on a rich guy's pet project. Taking investment makes it more of a real company that has to deliver something and is not subject solely to the whims of one person.
It said they are funded, but it doesn't mean they lost control or have to be VC hyper growth. Apart from Notable Capital and Amplify Partners all others are individuals. There are lots of benefits having these group of company founders and CEO as investors. They are likely interested in the problem space as well.
Had it been hyper growth startup you would be looking at a16z or other bigger names.
"With most of them being VC or high-count angel investors, they can combined push whatever product is being built here into 200+ companies independent of whether it is good or not"
Ah, I see you have figured it out the thing that has always been the case.
> why else would a ~billionaire that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
Investors can be good for funding but they can also be good for education. Later, they're also very good for strategy.
> What happened to the good old way of figuring out product market fit first? Is that the only way a product can succeed nowadays
Generally it's very challenging. I have two products I'm building this way and you face a lot of up-hill climb where people with VC backing are getting the door opened for them. Of course, because of those same pressures to deliver and succeed, it's equally possible those same doors will eventually get closed on them.
I think Mitchell also lives in a bit of a bubble now. He went from friendly open source guy to very rich friendly open source guy. That's no knock on him, but I would consider viewing business from the perspective of someone who has been a CEO, CTO, and IC at the same company (his company) as his only job who became insanely wealthy as a result. I have a friend who has largely only worked in big tech, and successful startups, who tells me all the time level and salary don't matter to him. They don't matter to him because he found success early. Again, not a knock but sustained success will shape how you view the world and how you play the game.
It's really awkward when you consider projects like Bun, which were VC funded, and ultimately bought out by a large company, what would they have even done to pay back the VCs that funded them?
> why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early
That was my question, too. Does Mitchell even need to take outside funding? I get why you would prefer to use others' poker chips instead of your own, especially if they're happy to give them to you, but usually funding comes with strings attached.
> why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
Something something "never spend your own money if you can spend someone else's money." That plus the perception of having those specific investors gives the idea/business fast authority/prestige.
I really wish mitchellh wouldn't take funding from some of these people. Tobias Lutke in particular has chronically been on the wrong side of fundamental issues, and has most recently advocated for a pay-to-play version of democracy where wealth determines your ability to participate (and in particular your "stake" in the democracy).
It's really unfortunate that the same traits that make you great at building a business (within capitalism) also often make you have psychopathic tendencies.
Easy to say this when the original commenter incorrectly described Tobias' comments. He suggested that those who pay more in taxes should have a greater say in how the government is spending the money. This is not a crazy idea on its face; you could say that taken to the limit it would not be a good system to live in (the highest taxpayer dictating what gov't does).
But it does make sense that those who are footing the bill for everything might be consulted a little on the plans to spend.
reading "those who pay more in taxes should have a greater say in how the government is spending the money" and NOT taking that to mean what the OP is suggesting it to mean is naive. Everyone knows what Tobias meant when he said that.
> Tobias Lutke /../ has most recently advocated for a pay-to-play version of democracy where wealth determines your ability to participate
He’s just looking at america post Citizens United and wishing he could ull the same shenans in Canada. It’s been working very well for the folks and orgs who can afford it
"I think this guy is dumb and wrong. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is going to have outsized influence on a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy may profit from a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is using his wealth to do dumb wrong things."
It's just another AI gobbledygook product whose sole purpose for existing is to cash in on the hype bubble, a few years from now this'll just be another in a series of infinite other VC grifts
It sounds like they're building a super-root which can destroy your whole infrastructure at once ???
From their website:
"Building and operating software today spans local machines, remote hosts, sandboxes, services, and production systems. It has many modes of operation: interactively with a human developer, automatically through CI and background processes, and increasingly through agents working in parallel.
[...]
We believe the missing layer is a durable session around the work itself: one that can span applications and environments, provide relevant context by default, expose structured data and actions, preserve history, and be driven by software while remaining visible and controllable by people.
[...]
This is our plan to build a multiplexer for all work:
1 Build an incredible multiplexer.
2 Make everything in it composable.
3 Make it safe and operable in production"
It’s a terminal multiplexer. Nothing in this announcement suggests to me that using this multiplexer will require the user to get root or super-root or any additional permissions. It’s what the user already has access to, but more “durable” (which I take a mean terminal session history on by default). And I don’t believe any short-lived secrets like ephemeral keys could have their lifetime extended by a terminal multiplexer. And nothing really supersedes RBAC which any respectable org should be using always.
I really like the bit where he transferred ownership of Ghostty to a non-profit, and is now building this new company on that as an open source dependency:
> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.
Kind of depends on the governance, which i am mot familiar with. Would be a shame for him to lose control when he has done a decent job so far. Transferring governance has turned into a woke mess enough times to be concerning.
This sounds like a mashup of of several things I've been playing with lately...
- pi-web (https://pi-web.dev/): a web frontend for the Pi coding harness which can multiplex pi sessions across multiple machines
- herdr (https://herdr.dev/): a fairly polished agentic multiplexer TUI, can easily spawn or destroy windows based on subagent activity
- firstmate (https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate): a meta environment for coding harnesses - more naturally handles spawning and communicating with subagents, managing worktrees, and other SDLC functions, and has a fairly large number of constraints thru bash scripts to ensure better results with less intelligent models
I've been working on collie[1] a plugin for herdr that runs a web app on the herdr host which can then be served via tailscale for example. This has made accessing my agents on the go a lot easier, paired with session persistence from herdr it's been quite nice to work with.
[1] https://github.com/AltanS/collie
Yes, thank you I have been using it daily and it's great. Good job
Plus one here. Just set it up! Works a treat! Thanks!
While not terminal-only, I've been using Orca (https://github.com/stablyai/orca) for the past week and it's been a great experience
Since you seem curious about these types of tools, might I interest you in ouijit https://ouijit.com/ https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit
Its intended as a terminal agent orchestrator aimed at power users who want a little more design than what I like to call 'hackerman' UXes.
have you tried Orca at all? I'm wondering between switching to herdr from it
I haven't tried Orca but as a herdr user and by way of analogy, it seems Orca is like VSCode and herdr is like Sublime Text.
As someone who has never used sublime I don’t get the analogy, but what do you like about herdr? Is it worth using? I came across it along with hunk at the same time and I’ve been using hunk a bit but didn’t really see the appeal of herdr over just my usual batch of terminal windows.
Herdr is my daily driver. It is lightweight and snappy while also being customisable (hence the Sublime Text analogy). I like that, while it supports tmux-style shortcuts, you can also use the mouse, so the learning curve is very gentle. In addition it's cross platform (Mac/Linux/Win) which is great for me because I needed something I can use on different machines.
Not the OP. I tried Orca for a few days, though I liked being able to manage git worktrees from the UI and being able to leave comments for the agent while I'm reviewing the diff, I found editing experience too slow for daily use. It's also missing some minor polish issues (vim bindings, being able to change default shell etc.) that were deal breakers for me.
Orca is my daily driver right now. It could be better but it’s far from bad. I was using superset before that-they are nearly identical.
I’m tracking them all here[0]
The first app in this space was VibeTunnel[1]. It basically lets you start terminals on your Mac and the web app allows you to control these terminals on your iPhone using Tailscale. In the end, it’s just terminals on the web with organization around it.
I forked VibeTunnel and turned it into a Next app and added workspaces with memory and turned it into a software factory which is making open-source alternatives for me while I sleep. I call it VibeGhost and will be launching it soon[2].
0. https://opensource.builders/alternatives/conductor
1. https://github.com/amantus-ai/vibetunnel
2. https://www.vibeghost.org
I'll add a few more to your list that I've been trying (not associated with either):
- Paseo (https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo)
- t3code (https://github.com/pingdotgg/t3code)
My daily driver is Agent of Empires (https://github.com/agent-of-empires/agent-of-empires)
Thanks, I get those added. There’s also Synara[0] which started as a T3 Code fork.
0. https://github.com/Emanuele-web04/synara
Why are you wasting households worth of electricity, and money, while people in this world starve so you can copy perfectly fine open source projects? You llm people have lost the plot.
Frankly I don't know a single person who does all this extra meta-agentic customization that gets anything done. You all are like the people who do nvim configurations all day and think they're being productive.
And it is fun!
> so you can copy perfectly fine open source projects?
They are copying proprietary SaaS solutions and releasing them as opensource, at least according to what I understand from https://openship.org/
Yes and Opensource.Builders is a directory of open-source alternatives where I post the ones I build as well. It's different than other open source directories since we track features in the code instead of just arbitrarily saying one thing is an open source alternative to another.
For Openship, the end goal is a decentralized marketplace.
This ethos goes into more detail
https://opensource.builders/ethos
I was thinking cmux
I don't understand herdr, can you explain it to me? I've tried it, but I don't understand what it gives me over tmux other than the agent sidebar. But people seem excited about it so I feel like I am missing something.
It's built for ai agents, tmux works but isn't designed for an ai workflow. Herdr is also very well thought out, not just the design/approach but also the interaction and mouse support, responsive support, etc. I had been using tmux, switched and haven't looked back.
I'm sorry but I am still confused. What specifically does herdr give me over tmux? "It is designed for agents" is just marketing speech, it means nothing. Ok, it has mouse support, fine, I don't care about that one but I can see how it's useful to some people. That has nothing to do with agents though. zellij also has a better user experience than tmux, so you could just use that or any of the other dozen multiplexers.
I understand it has the agent pane on the left that tells you what is running but... that's it?
IME yes that’s basically it. Other features haven’t really been significant value add for me. Some of the keybindings are different in minor ways. It has some mouse support but I have found that it doesn’t work well with certain apps/selections (eg: less).
It’s fine.
When running many agents something like the “idle/working workstreams” gutter is honestly helpful though.
You can check their own AI-generated comparison here: https://herdr.dev/compare/
Realistically, what I use about its agent stuff is:
- reliable notification pings either via what your terminal app uses (e.g., ghostty's) or system or just within herdr only
- if absolutely necessary, be able to tell agent sessions to observe and run commands on a herdr pane (security beware, for obvious reasons)
- herdr --remote which is basically a quick SSH -> attach to herdr on a remote
- prefix+g (equivalent to prefix+w in tmux) presents itself nicer, has binds for agent state filtering and its /search imho is mildly nicer than tmux's
Arguably, you can have the same points in others if you know how to configure tmux or zellij already, so if you're comfortable with that then you really don't have to use herdr.
There is a cross platform terminal notification cli that I used to vibe code notifications in like 5minutes and I have traffic light indicators on my tmux panes showing when an agent is waiting. The other things are also all possible. An agent is super happy to remote control tmux, it knows all the commands!
Yep, I did similar stuff too! Used something like ntfy to push notifs to an Android or just whatever commands are available on the OS you're in (e.g., `notify-send`). And for state reads herdr has `herdr pane read` while you can happily accomplish similar results with `tmux capture-pane` or similar.
Herdr holds potential in stuff like their socket API ( https://herdr.dev/docs/socket-api/ ) and whatever enhancements they wish to bring (e.g., https://herdr.dev/docs/agent-automation/ ) so if that appeals to others, it's worth a shot.
But for most regular users, tmux and other multiplexers work just fine.
> It's built for ai agents, tmux works but isn't designed for an ai workflow
So an opportunity to learn the Bitter Lesson [1].
If tmux is good enough for people today, it should be good enough for agets tomorrow. That gap might comprise a beachhead. But you'd better scramble off the shores onto something more defensible fast.
[1] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
You say this like there's no value in a transitional technology. Yes, tmux should be good enough for agents tomorrow. But here we are, today.
Also, herdr is just an open source project with no VC capital behind it. So I don't think it needs to scramble to something more defensible. It can live a happy life pleasing users and then fade into obsolescence.
> Yes, tmux should be good enough for agents tomorrow. But here we are, today.
tmux is good enough for agents today. they're great at driving it, they're great at customizing it, what's the problem people have with it? i am confused.
It also doesn't have copy-paste buffers, which makes me sad. Relies on OSC52 support / system clipboards - and when you are 3 emulators / tunnels deep into a connection - rarely works.
I don't really get it either. I installed it to try it out, but I still don't understand why it's getting so much attention. I don't even use tmux. My window manager already gives me workspaces, splits, and tiling, so I don't need those features there. I also prefer focusing on a single project instead of juggling five at once. And I don't really care about notifications. I just switch back to the relevant workspace and check on things when I want to. So apart from the agent sidebar, I'm not seeing what problem it solves for me either.
you miss the multiplexer part. multiplexers are awesome if you have them on a persistent machine like a server you SSH into. To me herdr feels more like a modern alternative to tmux or zellij with the agent features being a nice add on.
Isnt zellij quite modern? What does herdr do better than zellij?
As a zellij sponsor I’ve been wondering the same.
I rebuild herdr from master every few days to gauge the direction it’s moving in.
What herdr gets right over zellij:
- Default keybinds don’t conflict with helix. Even the leader key mode in zellij keeps alt-bindings around. Herdr keeps things nicely tucked away.
- There’s beta support for the kitty image protocol. Three years on, we’re still waiting in zellij.
- Notifications get passed correctly through to the terminal.
As for herdr’s killer feature, agent status monitoring, there is apparently a zellij plugin.
Big win for zellij: the docs and code feel human. By contrast, herdr’s docs have all the tells of a vibe coded project. Not to say the maintainer hasn’t put care into it! But I’m getting burned out on LLM docs.
I started to use tmux-claude-session-manager (https://github.com/craftzdog/tmux-claude-session-manager) in tmux, to have a pop-up to see all active sessions. I don't have many in parallel, so usually I don't even need, but if I'm lost or forgot one, it's really helpful.
0 friction, intuitive ux. Mouse, scroll wheel tabs all work out of the box. Still is an ugly tui, but orders of magnitude better than tmux.
To even get started with tmux you need to invest days to learn the keyboard commands. And yes good luck merging windows.
I can’t wait to forget all of the useless cli crap that Unix forced me to learn because nobody gave a damn about ux.
It workss a lot better for me especially copy paste which was always flakey af for me in tmux no matter what plugin i tried. 2 dimensions of panel amalgamation is suprisingly beneficial to my work flow organization too. The ai m(nitors would be useful if i cared about that. Herdr spreader plugin gives me tmuxp like behavipur especially with the herdinator.sh script currently in issues. Overall a big improvement over tmux without the bloatey slow feeling of zellij
For now I didn't find anything that really works better than using termux on android or echo on ipad, ssh into my desktop with tailscale where I have a tmux session I can attach to. "Input" seems to be the biggest struggle for me versus a normal desktop+keyboard setup. On ipad I use a nuphy bluetooth keyboard which works pretty well and on android I use FUTO Keyboard with voice input.
Overall I think I don't even want to start coding too much on the go with a setup like this but it's nice to have options :)
You can swipe the Termux special ribbon to the left and then get a native text input where dictation etc all work.
Cheers, you just changed my life.
Neat trick. I had no idea.
Exactly, thats what makes it work with FUTO stt!
Pardon the plug, but I thought I'd point out that I think SciCommander [1], or the ideas behind it, could be very relevant for this stack.
It does capture a provenance graph for any ad-hoc shell commands executed in the shell mode, or if prepended by `sci run`, by tracing all new files created from commands, and creating an accompanying json file for every output with metadata, which can later be assembled into a graph specific to any output file, using the `sci tohtml` or `sci toshell` commands (producing an HTML report with an SVG graph, or a reproducing shell script, respecively).
I'm quite bullish of the possibilities with this approach.
And, this was in fact also born out of the thinking to "rip apart" workflow tools, and build them up again using small, well-defined tools that do one thing well.
[1] https://github.com/samuell/scicommander
I’ve been looking for something like this!
These tools all assume you have machines to run the agents on. But for parallel agents I'm pretty convinced you want each agent on its own isolated devbox running your dev environment (not e.g. worktrees on one box) - which isn't trivial to set up and manage.
I'm working this with https://boxes.dev - a workspace for launching and managing claude + codex sessions, each running in its own cloud devbox.
We launched with a desktop app but have gotten a lot of pull for terminal-driven workflows, so have a TUI as well. It's interesting - when the Codex desktop app launched I was so sure that GUI is the future for coding agents (it's just a chat!). But turns out there's no killing the CLI
Running on a Cloudbox has its own set of problems. Some projects need desktop GUI tools (particularly desktop apps themselves, but some may also want these for profilers / debuggers etc). Some projects need USB. Even if you don't need any of those, you need to figure out what to do about build caches, package manager environments, credentials / secrets, VPN config, shell customizations, and those are just a few things that come to mind.
I do like having a permanent, remote workbox, but am a lot less keen on the idea of ephemeral boxes unless you're a company willing to invest into that infra.
Also the reason why https://exe.dev exists.
no affiliation, just want to say exe.dev is amazing! They got all the primitives right and it’s changed the way I approach starting new projects.
I stopped running Claude on the terminal and use only the desktop app now. It had lots of advantages in my opinion. The terminal is really limited unfortunately, don’t know why so many devs still stick to it, and I used it for 30 years.
Interesting, which OS are you using?
If linux, can you name 1-2 advantages the desktop has over the terminal?
I'm using Hermes but these should apply to any agent that has both TUI and GUI versions. The GUI version will have:
- drag and drop
- show document type, icon and filename
- inline images
- variable fonts, esp. monospace for code blocks
So GUI is mainly about readability. CLI works fine too but is inherently limited. I think GUI agents will keep pushing further in information layout, rendering, retrieval and interactivity. We're just at the beginning of it.
Even more basic stuff like copy and paste, which works like everywhere else except the terminal. Can you paste something in the middle of what you already typed in your terminal? Not in mine. It can highlight the stuff as you type it , though some terminals can also do that somewhat. It has a list of my sessions so I don’t need to have lots of terminals open or juggle them with tmux and stuff like that. I can actually click on a command to see its output and expand individually thinking sections and so on. I can review code on a side bar instead of losing the text box I am writing on. There’s probably hundreds of more advantages you must really make an effort to not see.
The only advantage of the terminal is that it’s easier to use on remote machines. I can’t think of anything else, even the usual benefits of composing commands is not relevant for a CLI like Claude Code.
my main reason: i cannot run agents persistently on a remote host with a desktop app.
>for parallel agents I'm pretty convinced you want each agent on its own isolated devbox running your dev environment (not e.g. worktrees on one box)
Why?
thank you herdr.dev ! it is awesome.
This reminds me somewhat of OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, ... [1]. You can paste an Excel chart into a Word document and if you update the data in Excel, the chart in Word will update. You can edit the chart in Word using the Excel UI because you are essentially running an Excel instance inside of Word. You can interact with Excel through an API, no need for a human. But it is painful, you can probably imagine the kind of API you need in order to be able to do all the things you can do with the Excel UI.
The idea is amazing, making this work consistently requires effort, and a lot of it. And as only a few applications invested this effort, it only works with a few applications and never really took off outside of Microsoft. I think this used to work with WordPad and maybe even Notepad but it no longer does, you just get an image instead of the chart object in WordPad and nothing at all in Notepad. It is a dying technology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
I think you may have meant to comment on another post :)
No, correct post. But maybe I am misunderstanding the idea behind the post, that is certainly possible.
At least there's no history of security issues with that.
Can you explain how the COM/ActiveX security history applies here?
I had a similar wincing reaction to the expressed idea of wanting to converge output, control, and interaction under a terminal muxer in today's wacky world.
But that's because today's world is forcing us towards overwhelming risk management and compliance systems like NIST 800-53 and friends. If anything, these mechanisms are being drawn, quartered, and spread to the opposite corners of the Earth.
Control via configuration management systems with configuration drift detection etc. Outputs and diagnostics via monitoring, logging, audit, and accountability systems. Authorization systems with extreme least privilege, draconian rules for privileged role assumption. Interaction removed from the entire operations plane, so it only exists in some application domain concepts as a sort of ship in a bottle, which eventually perversely recurses into the same mindset for domains with interesting content and user roles.
Lots of access path restrictions intentionally limiting which usage scenario is available in which combination to which user type from which locale with which client device.
So the idea of flexible and convenient fusion of many different IO and control paths into a portable and remotely attachable terminal UX seems like the complete antithesis..?
Or such a fusion will be in the next release of systemd…
They can at least deliver baseline value, because it's all text-based. Do agree that it'll become more complex, when/if they decide to create custom protocols.
Meta, won't comment on the site, won't click. I'm fed up with this category of click baity titles that are designed to be enigmatic rather than informative.
The guideline do not mention this, apart maybe from:
I'd prefer HN if we made it a habit to editorialize such titles consisting solely of a Domainname or a single word.
Without clicking you’d never know why it’s the title.
that's kinda the point -- titles on HN usually indicate the sort of content that's behind clicking through, and whether it might be something interesting to the prospective reader. this one doesn't because it's the name of the company.
The actual header on the page is
> We are building the multiplexer for all work.
imo this would have been a better way to do the HN submission title (with or without [terminal])
> Superlogical: We are building the [terminal] multiplexer for all work
I clicked on the link and read the page, but I still don't have the faintest idea what a "multiplexer for all work" is, or why I want one. The more I read about it, the less I understand about it. Guess I'm not the target audience. At least I know that now, after several minutes of reading and head-scratching.
I almost get tmux -- although I still don't understand why it's better than simply opening multiple terminal window instances like I've always done in Windows -- but I'm struggling to see how the concept of terminal multiplexing applies elsewhere.
Same, at first, I thought it would be something like Glean for enterprise information joining to follow feature delivery or something and then I saw terminal and I gave up.
If you're using Windows you're likely not the audience. Which is fine.
Not really; not without understanding what am I missing. Why does Linux need a "multiplexer for all work," while Windows either already has one, doesn't need one, or couldn't use one?
A Multiplexer let's you run multiple terminals in one window, this is a new one. WindowsOS does not get as nice of tools as Linux generally.
Except you don't need a multiplexer for that. Essentially all modern terminals have tabs. Many have split-screen. Even windows ships with a half-decent terminal with tabs and multiple panes by default now!
A multiplexer's job is to do the whole multiple tabs/panes/windows thing independently of the terminal itself, but (a) the UX for eg. tmux is so much worse than that of a good terminal UI, and (b) you only need that if you plan on connecting remotely (see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108483).
After using a tiling WM, it feels like this is a window manager job. It even works for non-terminal applications.
With tux the biggest difference and gain is that you can detach and resume the terminal session, leaving processes running on the "server" (where tmux was initially started) even if your "client" disconnects. On top of this, you can have multiple terminals inside the same session.
So it's like launching processes with nohup?
Yes, except if you launch a process with nohup, then close your terminal and open a new one how do you reconnect to it? I assume there's a way to do it but I don't know how (probably someone with more unix-fu will reply), plus you can't see the previous output. Whereas with screen/tmux you can just pop it open again and see the whole session.
By default, SIGHUP has no signal handler, and so a process that receives it will exit. The kernel should send SIGHUP to all child processes when you quit the shell session or the terminal file (pty/tty) is closed. Processes trying to write to a nonexistent terminal may be terminated by SIGPIPE.
So you launch a process with nohup(1). This puts SIGHUP and others on ignore status, redirects output to a file, and then executes your process. This is similar to how a daemon starts, when it explicitly dissociates from any terminal device.
With tmux or screen, a layer of pseudo-ttys (ptys) is created, and process groups are managed, so your terminal's pty is only connected to the master tmux process, and each subprocess/window is assigned a new pty and process group of its own, as if you had remotely logged in to each shell.
So tmux is now handling SIGHUP and can detect when your terminal or session closes out. The persistence of subprocesses comes from the fact that they aren't receiving SIGHUP and that they are still associated with pty, as tmux is running "daemonized" until you reattach.
Tmux is good because: 1) sessions stay running if you disconnect 2) window management - you can split your screen, have an octobox a-la redzone style, and focus/unfocus etc.
This is based on developing on a remote server - but even locally, I find it invaluable. Multiple terminal windows are fine, but some times you want multiple windows. Even in a pre-ai world, you might want to run a process, see the code, edit, and maybe have htop or something like that. If you ever NEED multiple terminal windows for the same thing, tmux is really the answer.
One reason I find it hard to grasp is that when I work on Windows, it's almost always through RDP or VNC. There is never any question of a terminal (or a process launched from it) staying open between login sessions, because it never depended on any particular connection to begin with. It's just there, on the desktop, which might stay up for months before I need to connect to it again. Any terminals or other processes I launch on that system will be there until I close them intentionally, or until Microsoft decides to reboot the system without my permission.
So when I dip my toes into the Linux world, the first thing I do (or rather ask an LLM harness to do, being much less familiar with Linux than I am with Windows) is set up an RDP host. That way I can follow the same basic workflow on both OSes. I don't need to do anything special with terminal windows.
I guess if I were running truly headless systems that don't even have a VGA frame buffer, I'd be more interested in multiplexing. But so far I haven't had to do that, and would probably resist it because a persistent desktop strikes me as better in general than letting applications including terminals worry about their own lifetimes.
Tmux only makes sense if you’re connecting remotely in some form or another. Otherwise, it’s just terminal windows/tabs with extra steps. Even if your terminal integrates with tmux like iterm2 does (where local tabs become tmux tabs, local windows become tmux windows, etc), it doesn’t really mean much if it’s all local anyway.
The usual arguments make no sense if you’re only on your local machine:
- You can detach the session: well yeah, I can minimize the terminal window too.
- You can have multiple tabs/windows in a session: yup, same with my window manager
- You can keep multiple sessions and attach/detach from them whenever: I can do that with multiple desktops in my window manager
And so on.
But, once you want to do all of this on a remote server, it all makes sense: putting my laptop to sleep shouldn’t end the session on the server. If I get disconnected for some reason, I should be able to reattach and resume it if I reconnect. So then you have the session run on the server and you only “attach” to it when you connect, and if your terminal has good integration, new tabs become new tmux tabs etc… it’s all transparent.
It’s also useful if you’re running a session locally but anticipate wanting to attach to it from somewhere else: if your terminal session is tmux from the start, you can transparently attach to it from another machine too.
But, if you’re just dealing with one machine, who cares, just skip the multiplexer. (It’s literally not “multi” plexing if there’s only one client!)
Another thing worth mentioning is that if your terminal doesnt have good tmux integration, and you’re only running locally anyway, your life is strictly worse off with tmux: scrolling is a horribly broken hack, buffer search sucks, copy/paste never works, switching open terminals is an awkward ctrl+b contortion, etc. No amount of fiddling with your tmux config is going to make the UX as good as a decent terminal has, and I will die on this hill. :-)
website is very vague - not useful content - no information, some gradient box without any content, team thats it. Super annoying landing page. Even if HN title is not descriptive the website is not helping to figure out what this is all about.
One of the worst I've seen was title editorialized from original "Someone: something [x.com]" to just "Something [x.com]".
Wow, that "We're hiring/Career Page" link is geeksmaxxing.
First time seeing `ssh superlogical.jobs` would be a way to show job descriptions in terminal!
NSA and other companies historically had you jumping hoops and writing mini-exploits to be able to see the email you're supposed to send your resume to.
I actually heard of that.
"I completed the Synacor challenge" is still a good way to get experienced CTOs' attention.
"I completed the Frobnicator challenge" probably works just as well. No one would want to admit they'd never heard of it.
Or just write a good covering letter and email it to yourself.
Don't even send it. A draft is enough.
Final Exam https://m.xkcd.com/2385/
The ssh thing is really fun, but I wish they had another way to view the openings. I'm on a connection with massive latency at the moment and it's pretty horrible UX in this case
That’s probably not the type of connection they’re looking for employees to have.
But could also be a good software tester if given any kind of remote connection support feature.
I'm on holiday.
That's probably not the type of work/life balance they're looking for employees to have.
Haha it would be really sad if this was true, but your comment really made me laugh. Thanks for that!
While that might be tongue-in-cheek, no company I have ever worked at has had a better work/life balance than the earliest days of HashiCorp (low tens of people) when Mitchell was the CEO.
Perhaps they should build a mosh too.
I assume that it should be quite straight-forward to make it work with https://mosh.org/ instead.
That's because you aren't using Ghostty as a terminal.
It’s probably a good filter too for applicants
Yes, prefilter for sure.
probably also designed to prevent spam-AI submissions
In case others were interested, they are not a remote-first company and require you to live in LA, NY or London.
They can be remote. You need to show up in the office. It's not giving leadership.
I must admit that I paused before hitting enter on that command and thought to myself, "Maybe I should download Ghostty and open it with that as a virtue signal." :-)
Definitely as $TERM is sent by SSH.
Better be using ghostty ;)
I recommend 'ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no superlogical.jobs` if you have a public key and want to stay anonymous (beyond revealing your IP).
Why? Because if you use SSH to connect to connect to GitHub, your SSH public key is published at https://github.com/<username>.keys so an SSH server to which you connect could do a reverse lookup.
This is the reason why my ~/.ssh/config has those 2 lines at the end:
Author of https://github.com/dolmen/github-keygen here.
"Hey, Linus Torvalds logged in 100 times today!"
"Woah, he must really want a j--- oh."
Thanks for the tip! Yeah, I think Mitchell Hashimoto (ssh CLI command came from his new company's official site) can be trusted here. If they were doing Github pub key harvesting for analytics though, it would be a interesting tracking pixel equivalent!
You obviously should connect from Ghostty.
But try also `TERM=dumb ssh superlogical.jobs` for an alternate, monochrome, experience.
Undocumented keys h,j,k,l also work to navigate the UI.
Any other easter eggs?
Sorry, the text is too vague - what are they building exactly, another tmux?
P.S. That custom disappearing scrollbar doesn't look super logical; it doesn't even look logical, tbh.
Yes. I find it quite funny that 4 people with the flashiest of titles (head of experience?) came up with this amazing plan:
1. it will be incredible
2. it will be composable
3. it will be safe to use in production
I would totally invest millions into these guys, they have a bright future ahead.
My first thought was that they have several people who seem like they'll expect very serious compensation but no actual product, then I noticed they already seem to have a whole bunch of VC backers. I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little jealous of people who can make a flashy vaporware pitch deck and ride the VC gravy train.
I feel like it must be worthwhile for Hashimoto to move on from Ghostty to this.
If it is ‘just’ a better tmux-like experience, then that could be very useful if these agentic workflows actually arrive.
I still don't understand why tmux authors wasted their time on tmux, tho, when we already had perfectly servicable GNU screen.
Why reinvent the wheel?
/s
Flashback to when Mitchell first introduce Vagrant [1] to HN, which of course was the how everything from HashiCorp started.
I thought it was't that long ago, may be 8, or at best 10-12 years.
Turns out 16 years has passed.
Curious if it would be another project using Zig.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901
Considering it's going to consume libghostty, I'm betting it'll be Zig.
libghostty exports a C ABI. For an application from Mitch at this layer I would guess Go.
Mitch said he doesn't like go since they added generics.
I checked the available jobs and they are hiring Typescript for web, Go for infrastructure,systems, Objective-C, swift for Apple
I dig the ssh jobs page, UX is very good.
Yes and they don't mention any language at all for Windows. Just "native", which is pretty much a philosophical question for that platform. I guess that means the founders have all avoided that platform their entire lives - which makes perfect sense but it means they have to trust their first engineering hire to make every consequential decision.
Personally I'd recommend they hire someone who has done native windows like its 2001 and is willing to use Zig.
Zig has bindings for Win32, etc., so a competent Windows developer should be as comfortable using that as C, C++, or whatever else people write Windows programs in these days. (At some point, it was intended that Windows programs would be written in Pascal, but that never caught on.)
Most of the time when I need to touch a Windows program I'm dealing with the Telegram desktop client which is C++ and a mixture of Qt and "native" Windows. (Well, that, and when I have to touch an ancient C# code base which requires doing the equivalent of archeology in order to get all of its dependent libraries to work.)
He says here that they have a direct Tailscale integration of the type that requires using the `tsnet` package, which is Go. Or at least would pull in the Go runtime as part of a shared library.
https://x.com/i/status/2082634453474795885
Interesting choice because tailscale is not free. Building in a paid third-party service is a questionable decision.
They better acquire it, if their product catches on.
Building with wireguard directly instead of tailscale would have been my choice, but of course it requires more plumbing.VC money means they gotta move fast.
But as a potential user, I won't pay for tailscale just to use their product.
What's wrong with the Tailscale free tier?
There is also Headscale if you want to self host.
https://headscale.net
There is nothing wrong with tailscale, it's just a dependency that can cost money charged by a third-party, so their product is less self-sovereign because it depends on tailscale keeping up a free tier.
Headscale seems interesting! I'll check it out
The application layer is in Swift at least.
They hire for Go.
It would be pretty odd right now to be hiring people with "Zig experience".
And Nix!
They're using Go, Swift, and Zig: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2082623830510710865?s=20
I feel like the main benefit of such a thing would be centralization. Part of the issue with the terminal ecosystem is precisely that everything's so fragmented and everybody needs to support arcane terminal protocols and wrap a billion wrappers around each other. The easiest way to solve this is to be a definer yourself rather than an integrator, which I think is what this is trying to be. If we could actually have standardized terminal extensions in one place (you'd be surprised how many extension codes there are in terminal land) that has a different semantics not from the 80s, but still captures the terminal experience, that would be great.
The 'cleanest' experience I've got for what I want is mosh + tmux and even that has issues (no block cursor for example).
If superlogical's ultimate goal is to revamp the Linux developer ecosystem, all for it. Am potentially worried long term about these kinds of strategies from a political point of view but as long as things stay open source and stay as local dev tools, its fine.
Right, but I'm pretty sure this is not the first time somebody thought about solving it.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Just look at the comments, everybody is like "look I built the same thing" LLM people have fried their ability to be original, its kind of nice knowing all my competition in tech has no original thought anymore.
There is PR somewhere in the mosh repo to support block cursor. Just build it manually. Mosh is abandoned, unfortunately.
Yeah I have my own forks for it, it's just annoying since usually I want to just install things on a machine and just "have it work". Mosh is also extra annoying because it depends on ssh and libcrypto stuff, which I have not found working with my current "install all my deps on a machine and run" workflow yet (e.g. from what I understand you basically have to compile from source for certain things that touch ssh and security; I wasn't able to get a portable git install either, instead I just trust the systemwide one and don't use old distributions).
I've found that I'm making compromises that keep integration with existing systems minimal at the cost of perfect aesthetics :(
> Location Though the team has spent many years scaling remote-first companies and is currently remote, we are hiring specifically in Los Angeles, London, and New York, with an expectation for a flexible in-office schedule as we build our presence in each region.
I always get a "lifestyle business" vibe when tech companies are based in LA or NY. When you're a seasoned veteran you'd prefer to live in a larger, more fun city, even though tech is concentrated in the Bay Area
Or you want to hire the kind of seasoned veterans who want to live in those cities. Often later-career, families, looking for exposure to more than just a thriving tech scene.
And salaries are lower than SF.
I don’t think that’s a parsimonious explanation in a post-COVID world. It seems equally if not more likely that talent is more distributed, and people find fewer reasons to relocate into the Bay Area (in terms of career progression, etc.)
(This is not, in my mind, either a good or a bad thing.)
Like notable lifestyle businesses Datadog, Squarespace, Etsy, Tinder, and Snap.
What do you mean by lifestyle business?
A business that lets employees have a healthy work-life balance.
Thanks, it’s a bit concerning that’s not considered the default
That's not the original meaning of a "lifestyle business" anyways, which is more like a business that makes enough (to its owners, nothing to do with the employees) for them to maintain their desired lifestyle, like maybe a few million in revenue or whatever, but can't / won't be scaled beyond that because their lifestyle is already well supported by the current business growth / volume / revenue so they have no interest on blitzscaling, taking VC money, and running the perpetual growth treadmill or because the business is already topped-up and won't support further scaling (its not always a choice)
Ah ok, in that case Superlogical doesn’t sound like a lifestyle business given the number of VCs involved
Yes, indeed, although i think in this case it was just signalling how not being "SF focused" might be seen as a lack of ambition or whatever in such VC contexts or something and thus the exaggerated comparison to it being a lifestyle business merely due to the location requirements on ny/la (nicer cities to live in, maybe, than SF, or whatever)
i think just michael is based on LA, so he prefers having the offices near his home (has kids, etc), and has enough FU money to not need to let the VC's dictate where the HQ's are located at.
I guess also they dont love the idea of managing people remotely for a small startup/first hires, although im sure for the right person they wouldn't really care (or usually this is how it goes on most small companies/startups)
I guess if you have nothing else to live for except your job, you'd be really psyched to keep dumping more hours into it...
Generally I think lifestyle business means a business that is going to make the owners a comfortable living but not likely to make anyone filthy-rich.
In silicon valley/tech it's sometimes treated as a derogatory term.
In finance and VC-funded -startup worshipping circles it is derogatory, because it means you aren't trying to scale like a VC-funded-startup.
That space is often confused with “tech”, and obviously overlaps with it, but its not the same thing.
"lifestyle business" is sometimes used as a derogatory term to describe setting up a corporation for a hobby that is not really meant to be profitable.
That's not what a lifestyle business is.
In VC circles, "lifestyle business" refers to a business that is profitable but has no plans for scaled up growth and instead basically exists to provide a job to its owner or founder that lets them live a lifestyle they like, including the job itself.
It is how I hear people using the term idk what to tell you
Its interesting they recognize they've themselves worked remotely for most of their careers but not for our new company. Maybe its a new trend
They've taken funding. i saw that on their site. vcs probably told them not to make it fully remote, given current rto trends.
Funny how just 3-4 years ago on this forum people were openly prognosticating about how the era of fully remote work was here to stay and the centre of gravity of investment no longer had to be SV and YCombinator was running fully remote sessions, etc. etc.
And here we now have people saying stuff like this again.
Also, long live the "lifestyle business" if it means people just making businesses that bring in non-exponential but justifiable and sustainable income ... like, y'know, a business is supposed to. Good grief.
God forbid someone see their kids after work. Won't someone think of the potential profits in performatively staying late at work?
Another example of the galaxy brain people who like employees to go to an office but then are happy to have offices all over the world, some of which have 8 hours of timezone difference.
Are they the champions of collaboration or the champions of company culture?
Did mitchellh leak a demo video last week?
https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2079327969416482859#m
This might me tmux alternative he had talked about before? Maybe a part of the superlogical ecosystem, but just like libghostty is?
> We're also addressing the most common papercuts of existing tools, such as making scrollback, selection, and scrolling all work natively.
Goes ahead and butchers the browser scrollbar.
Scrollbar is fine for me? Just styled
Invisible until moused over, or scrolled by other means. Barely visible even then. In the wrong place. It may be "just styled", but it's certainly not fine.
On iOS the whole page jumps up and down when you try to grab it.
I've spend the last ~20 years inside tmux/vim — and the last month almost exclusively in the Codex desktop app, and increasingly am just doing remote control from the ChatGPT app on my phone.
Ghostty rocks and it brings me no pleasure to say this, but it seems unclear how much longer this world will exist?
The agents have to live somewhere. They address your question in the post.
Their intention is to let you live inside, well, Superlogical which can run on your Mac or Windows desktop, and, eventually, on your phone, too.
I still regularly need to edit text files and use nvim for that. Sometimes I even use it to edit a prompt. I like to prompt my system by writing .md files to help get through the planning phase, and then I like to edit the generated todo list.
> Though the team has spent many years scaling remote-first companies and is currently remote, we are hiring specifically in Los Angeles, London, and New York, with an expectation for a flexible in-office schedule as we build our presence in each region.
If its got Mitchell, I’m in.
To make it more relevant: right now I mostly rely on tmux. Before that I’ve been a long time user of screen (irssi over ssh people know this play). Looking forward to this.
[flagged]
more info please!
He thinks ability to vote (and the number of votes you get) should be based on income.
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/business/article/shopify-...
Taxes paid was actually what was said.
I may be going astray, but I can see a way to degenerate "taxes paid" to "taxes before deductions" to "income since it relates to taxes anyways"
It doesn't have to be that complicated. Just absolute terms could have the desired effect.
- 1% tax of 10 million = 100k
- 20% tax of 100k = 20k
Hence, the rich pays more tax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_returns_of_Donald_Trump "Trump paid no net federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years of the past two decades. After the refund, Trump had an average tax bill of $1.4 million per year over the 18 years.[52][176] In 2016, Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax, and in 2017, he paid another $750 in federal income tax."
If there was an unequal vote, I am pretty sure rich people would want votes as heavy as possible.
If you read it again you will notice that technically he thinks that, to satisfy those who believe the wealthy don't pay tax, Canada could use a system to encourage the wealthy to claim income, where that is incentivized by being able to vote. Often the wealthy have no need for income as they already have so much wealth and can easily borrow against that wealth as cash needs present themselves. It is believed (at least as far as the thread went) that the wealthy currently don't pay tax, and thus would be unable to vote, or their vote would count for little, under the proposed since they don't have sufficient income to qualify.
That would be true if he advocated for votes according to effective taxation rate or something similar. He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember, which is a rounding error to his income class.
Instead, he makes sure to include the idea of stripping low-income people of all voting rights.
> which is a rounding error to his income class.
Not at all. The idea is that his class claim very little income, if any income. His income class is ~$0 (or believed to be, at least). You can certainly make an argument that the claim isn't true, that the ultra-wealthy are actually already paying huge sums in income tax, but then you cannot take the thread out of context. It was clearly directed at those who believe the wealthy pay no income tax. It literally says so. Did you skip step one and not go back to read it again?
> He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember
You are correct, approximately, but there would have been no need to remember given step one, so that was clearly ignored. Why? What is the purpose of replying without even reading the comment you are replying to?
Lutke's own post was about pension = no votes, which I identify as the thing he decided to actually spent time on. His other tweet is a Musk-like "Good idea" reply to someone else's proposal regarding tax brackets, no?
I don't think memory fails me on the main points. If you think ranking the same read facts differently from you means faulty reading, I don't really owe you the labor of explaining where that fails.
> His other tweet is a Musk-like "Good idea" reply to someone else's proposal regarding tax brackets, no?
Yes, that is the one we are talking about. The pension comment was posted earlier and isn't directly applicable to the discussion taking place.
The other comment did happen, to be sure. I guess we can change the subject if you want to. The comment that came prior to it asserted that the only way to solve the housing crisis is to take the power away from those who most participate in local government (i.e. retired people). To which Tobi suggested that one way to address that is to allow one to choose power or a pension, but not both, suggesting that pensioners have become dependents and thus no longer have any real stake in the future of a locality.
Which certainly isn't a novel idea. I've heard the same thing many times from people who are ostensibly poor. Many honestly believe that retirees (a.k.a. boomers) who "got theirs" are why housing is out of their reach. You could make a good case that Tobi was trying to play up "I'm just like the little guy" when he isn't actually, but if that is the case, what is our takeaway from that?
Step one means fuck-all nothing with a cap of $800K. Its not as if billionaires truly pay $0 in tax. $800K is approximately $0 to a billionaire so they'd all just pay that.
> Its not as if billionaires truly pay $0 in tax.
Exactly. Which means the plan is automatically invalidated by its own design. It literally states that it exists only to appease those who believe that the wealthy don't pay tax, which is unnecessary as the wealthy already do pay tax. I guess that's what makes it a good plan. It is already in effect!
Why would they care? The ultra-wealthy impact election through donations, which is many order of magnitudes more impactful than their personal ballot, even if you were to give them 10x weight. Elon Musk impact on the U.S. election wasn't because he drove to the booth.
Maybe worth mentioning that the founding fathers in the US believed only property owners should vote.
Not the most important(IMO) of our founding fathers, Thomas Paine.
Let's make everyone a property owner by default at birth
Franklin also practiced air bathing instead of hygiene.
Franklin also supported universal male suffrage, wrote Pennsulvania’s 1776 constitution which adopted universal male suffrage, and condemned property requirements for the franchise, reportedly arguing:
“Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars, and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers — but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass.”
They also didn't forbid slavery. It doesn't mean they were right.
“Didn’t forbid”, if referring to the framers of the Constitution, is a bit of an understatement, given that they created multiple layers of protection to prevent dismantling slavery at the federal level into the future.
The founding fathers, the framers (a different and later group, though the two overlap and are often conflated) and original states had a variety of (and evolving in some cases between the Founding and the Constitution) opinions on the issue; some (Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, notably, the latter also the primary author of PA’s 1776 Constitution which also adopted this position at the state level) were in favor of universal male suffrage.
It's important to consider context when talking about people's moral positions over time.
We don't judge the founding fathers' morals by the same metrics we judge our contemporaries. That much should be obvious.
https://fortune.com/2026/07/27/shopify-ceo-voting-rights-str...
Along with a myriad of different controversies. Just searching his name will bring up many articles about his chronically online Elon Musk wannabe takes.
I found this just when I googled his name plus controversy
> Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke faced fierce online backlash in July 2026 after endorsing a social media proposal for a tax-tiered voting system that would strip voting rights from non-taxpayers and give multiple votes to high-income earners.
but if we go as far as to say
> If it’s touched by Tobias Lütke, I’m out.
does it mean control or sponsored, for example ladybird web browser...
Ladybird contributors have their own controversies that make the project hard to stomach
Ok, what is the new drama this time around?
It is a good thing you can use Google chrome instead which has zero contributors with stances you disagree with... I guess.
That vague posting is a bit frustrating to be honest.
Are you talking about the fact they do not accept pull requests? If yes, they had good reasons for doing so, LLMs make it really time consuming and exhausting to manage an open source community, I completely understand why they decided to stop accepting PRs for now
He came to Canada as an immigrant, made some buck and now unashamedly calls 'idiots' the very people that built the communities where he lives. The guy is a complete POS.
https://xcancel.com/tobi/status/2081155797640171641
Seems to have gone full on right-wing fash, similar to DHH.
Related post on Reddit from this week which discusses DHH's journey from left to right - https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1v95spw/what_the_hel...
Yep, a lot of toxic investors in this. Not touching it with a ten foot pole and lost a lot of respect for Mitchell. A couple of the other investors:
* https://x.com/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031
* https://x.com/search?q=from:lennypruss%20israel&src=typed_qu...
Yuck.
Just linking to a login nag.
Thanks for surfacing this. As another user says below, Mitchell had more leeway in choosing his investors than most anyone. His is a dispiriting choice.
VCs tend to be a toxic bunch. Hard to avoid that in our business
in this case mitchell is an exited founder with a net worth of over $1B so he can be choosier than almost anyone in this regard. Deeply disappointing he is taking money from Guillermo
things look different from Billionaire Island than they do to us plebs down here. it's crazy to expect such people to do the "right" thing, they're too far gone.
They're basically building in one layer what a lot of people are using multiple different apps for currently. Exactly as another commenter said, it's sort of a mix between herdr and proper remote access.
I use pi as my primary harness and then Claude code and Codex (but with the desktop app for some very specific things)
The last two have remote capability with their own app. With pi, you have extensions that can do remote access, but you still end up with three different places to look to get remote access properly from your phone.
People also use tmux and Zellij and any other number of combinations of different apps combined with some kind of remote access, but nothing that's unified and does everything all at once in one place. I feel like that's a good problem to solve if you can do it better.
It doesn't solve the fundamental problem however of inverting the flow from one human to many agents to many agents to one agent to one human.
Maybe I just missed the boat on hashicorp and similar solutioning, but I find a lot of the solutions for working with multiple systems using an intermediary shared language, such as terraform, end up obfuscating the problems they intend to solve and result in people who deal with and support those systems on a daily basis having very little understanding of how to interact and troubleshoot the core infra that is being built up with those tools.
Yes, building those solutions requires a lot of expertise, but I've never found the tools to be worth engaging with over just using what the standard platform tools they abstract away were replacing. Then you add in the economic rug-pull scenarios that have happened when utilizing software like this and I wonder why everyone hops on the bandwagon so easily.
What is the company they're building trying to solve that system maintainers can't already do? Isn't this just rebuilding OS windowing?
There is value in abstracting the underlying generic systems into more context-relevant primitives for people who just want to get shit done in that context.
Why not meet people where they are at?
If this product isn't valuable, then it will fail. I suspect it will not fail.
I get that premise, I guess I've just been around a lot of bad engineers that use these types of tools as crutches but can't actually articulate or diagnose problems well. They just regurgitate the syntax like it's a magic spell.
Does that apply here?
We're talking about abstracting generic OS windowing/multiplexing for what sounds like an agent-based development workflow modality where you're referring to what's happening in the panes/tabs/windows instead of the containers themselves.
We're not talking about software abstractions.
Looking really cynically, it does seem like it might transition into some kind of cloud-development situation. Your "one access to all development" is one ssh away from our mega 24/7 online compute farm, since we need to keep the sessions persistent. But you can access anything you want!
Hopefully that's not the endgame?
That was pretty much my takeaway from reading the website. Not my cup of tea, but I guess it might valuable to some?
I've had to use the aws cli at work a few times (not an expert), but I could see aws trying to compete here if this becomes a thing.
At the risk of sounding like a booster, I have noodled over whether this is a place that AI can legitimately provide some improvements. It's harder than just waving an AI at the problem, which is why we don't really have this yet. But one of the major issues with the intermediary language you're talking about is the rigidity of conventionally-applied programming. AI is a bit more flexible and gooey and more able to function as duct tape and bailing wire... but that does come with several tradeoffs of its own that need to be mitigated to some degree.
As a specific example of this, I've been using emacs since about 1997, but it's only this year that I've started down this sort of "integrate everything" road that it promises, because I've never wanted to learn emacs' specific Lisp variant that is used nowhere else. But now with AI I've done more emacs extensions that are providing real value to me than I have in the last... ever. About my previous limit was reifying a keyboard macro into a command, which still isn't really programming emacs.
The ability to indicate "intent" in a way that computers can actually process it as "intent" might change the calculus enough to make this more possible than it used to be in the past.
But those tradeoffs are real. Non-determinism is a problem. Difficulty in knowing what the AI is doing unless you're staring at its output, and even the ability to conceivably monitor an AI's output is only a transient thing we have at the moment, they'll speed up past our ability to monitor them at all soon enough. But it's at least a new area that can be explored and there may be solutions to some problems in there we couldn't reach before.
I expect the product from this company to resemble a combination of Orca + zmx
[0]: https://github.com/stablyai/orca [1]: https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx
Somewhat related, I recently heard of fentas/atty from:
https://erock.prose.sh/posix-shell-is-all-you-need
Agent orchestrators are the IDE dream repackaged. IDEs never really took off, excepting lock-in/monolopolization (Visual Studio, Xcode). They never lived up to the grand vision of the likes of Alan Kay. IDEs of today are still basically just text editors with a file explorer. Agent orchestrators seem similar. The vision is grand but the implementation is just tabbed terminals.
I think IDEs took off plenty well, but several got frozen in time.
Visual Studio as the IDE for building windows client apps, especially WinForms, was and still is a genuinely incredible and productive experience. The ease of which you could click-and-drag a UI, context switch to logic in the code behind the forms, wire up a web service backend, share domain models and have navigation and search tools understand all of it was great. And the TFS integration was quite good too. You really only had to leave VS to do database work or administer some IIS pools.
Unfortunately, it couldn't keep up with the rest of the dev world. "Server Explorer" morphed to include your Azure VMs but froze for 30s each time you opened it. Docker tools came in super late, most Azure services didn't really have a VS tooling experience. The "right click publish" workflow meant for small systems never figured out how to graduate to real-world needs across many teams. Developers had to learn how to use many other tools for modern stuff, and so VS became far less of a center of gravity, often to their annoyance.
I think they definitely have the IDE vision in mind and are trying to move off of terminals, based on two parts of the original article
> so you can close the application, reconnect from another device, and pick up exactly where you left off.
I think this is the remote IDE development dream that no one could quite get right, partly because there wasn't enough reason to run things on a 24/7 device. I think with coding agents that can run in the background this changes.
> Sessions can be accessed through the web and native macOS/iOS applications, and sharing a live session with other people is built in from the start.
I'd really like to point out that "Sharing a live session" is horrible UX for a terminal multiplexer because the terminal has to be the same size (# of rows/cols) on all viewers' screens, and some of these viewers may be on a phone and others on a laptop. Believe it, I tried myself and there's no good way around the problem.
What is interesting is that they added this sentence anyway. This tells me that their long-term endgame is not the terminal. They're most likely trying to build a GUI-based agent IDE and then eventually expand to other work (per their headline of being the "multiplexer for all work") as it all gets more and more agent-based anyways. Well, they're not alone in having that vision.
Do you think the future is more sophisticated agent management, or will tooling increasingly fall away to a single chat session with an executive agent of sorts?
There are plenty industry-specific niche IDEs that you probably never heard of that make up a significant part of many companies product offering.
Jetbrains is valued around $7bil and their business is almost exclusively in IDEs.
Wolfram Research is valued probably around $100mil and their business also mostly consists of an IDE product.
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With AI, I think the future of IDEs will be very split. A lot less work will happen in IDEs (in terms of LOC), but at the same time, I think AI will allow for a more sophisticated build-out of IDEs, so e.g. debug experiences will become a lot richer.
> IDEs never really took off, > still basically just text editors with a file explorer
JetBrains would disagree, as would I.
Nevertheless I agree this is the next _evolution_ in IDEs.
Serious question: if one were willing to give up on curses, isn’t Emacs/elisp providing the best multiplexing system available to humankind? And conceptually, why would agents ever need to depend on curses?
Concretely, Emacs/elisp isn't particularly great for handling the newer terminal protocols that allow things like Shift+Enter, Ctrl+Space, etc., along with high colour support or better handling of the alt/meta/⌥ key. Hence why the flurry of new terminal emulators.
The other problem is it does have to be hosted somewhere, and if you run it locally, it goes away when you close your laptop. If you run it remotely, you have the latency to the remote site. I suspect Superlogical is going to find a way to fix this problem.
If you can find a way to stop Emacs from being painfully single threaded, yeah.
This doesn't seem like a niche that isn't filled. Am I missing out on something by still just using iTerm2 and tmux?
I imagine something more like herdr, but done at the terminal level, not inside. But that’s cmux…
I've wondered this myself. I stuck with iTerm2 for a really long time but recently switched to Ghostty. Ghostty definitely seems to renders faster (I say "seems to" because I didn't benchmark or anything).
I don't actually use a multiplexer. I'm not sure I understand the use case when most terminal emulators supports tabs + windows (like iTerm2 does). Or you could just launch multiple windows and use your OS's window manager to "multiplex". Are the terminals connected in some way that I'm missing?
Regardless, I think Ghostty is a reminder that you can win in a space that's crowded. There's probably a lot of widely used software that would get dropped en masse immediately if someone had the guts to make a better alternative.
Typically, the benefit of the mux over just more windows or tabs is the ability to detach sessions from a term and have them continue to run. But yea, the “split a term window into multiple terms” doesn’t have quite as much value in a world of lots of tabs. That said, you can do it under program control on the remote host, so it does save remote login overhead, etc. But for local, less value.
If you like terminals and tmux, can I suggest you spend a few hours playing with herdr? It clicked for me in a way that a lot of other orchestrators didn't.
You are missing out a bit, but stay content. :)
Multiplexers have a lot of little papercuts and limitations when you want consistent and native-to-the-OS behavior to flow all the way between the OS and the apps and connections in the multiplexers. For example, gesture scrolling in a tmux/zellij pane is hard because the right events don't flow through. It's an itch to scratch like designing a good terminal lib (like ghostty.)
And then, there's all the unifying and smoothing out of data connections--I imagine they'll be a lot to make sure that, e.g., an ssh session or a Claude code session in a pane can be seamlessly reconnected or never drop when the pane is closed. This takes a lot of hacking to make look seamless in most setups right now.
Like mitchell, I write a lot of software around multiplexers, and I've thought about making something similar, but I don't have quite the same level of personal wealth or angel investor connections. :)
herdr and mosh are a couple of reference points for this, there are others.
> gesture scrolling in a tmux/zellij pane is hard because the right events don't flow through
I'm not sure what is meant by this, I can mouse over a pane in zellij and use two-finger scrolling to scroll only that pane without any problem.
Yes, but you can't, for example, transfer momentum vectors through zellij to the app.
If the app is offering what appears to be momentum, it's implemented its own acceleration/deceleration algorithm. That's a lot to ask of an app, and they aren't equally good.
Detecting a wide range of underlying terminal support for a CLI app is a pain and prone to errors/drift.
There are various plugins that attempt to solve this, but it'd be nice for someone to solve it once and for all, and then upstream those layers into open source as this project is promising to do.
I don't get it either. What's wrong with Terminal and tmux, screen or what have you?
I don't get the whole GPU rendering thing for ghostty either. Its a terminal emulator. It shows plain text. Why would I need GPU acceleration? I never felt "yeah, this terminal needs faster rendering".
Maybe I'm just an idiot
Really exciting IMO. Many people are working on new work interfaces (e.g. Codex/Claude/Cursor, multiplayer agent spaces, unified Slack/Notion/Zoom, etc.), and I think the Superlogical vision makes sense as a competitor in the space, at least to try.
There’s clearly room to improve our existing tools.
Im assuming that they've noticed tools like CMUX and Herdr (cmux is using libghostty too and i use herdr in ghostty) and this is gonna be similar?
I love how ghostty does windows/tabs/splits, but ultimately, I don't find myself using them. I find that I only have so much muscle memory in my hands, and I need to stick with one solution that works everywhere. A multiplexer let's me do this on my own machine, or if I'm SSH'd in elsewhere. Personally I use Zellij, because tmux feels like learning another vim. But I do use tmux when using tmate, because it's the simplest way I've found to share terminals.
Anyway, I'm very happy to see someone with Michell's talent entering this space. We can use more options with sane defaults and great performance.
The biggest strength to Tmux that a lot of the alternatives lack is you could make a shell script to setup your tmux instance(s) exactly as you would want, so by the time you load into it, its got all the tabs, split terminals, etc where you want them.
Sounds like something that could be done with by pulling in a few dozen Emacs extensions and writing a few thousand lines of elisp. (And one of those extensions would be the libghostty base ghostel.)
It's sort of what I'm doing already -- using emacs-server to provide portable persistent sessions on top of a bunch of terminals, agents and editor buffers.
It's a 1% effort on my part and super janky and super me-specific -- if somebody put a small fraction of the effort into it that others are putting into superlogical and the other alternatives listed here, it could be awesome....
This is like the “why not use FTP yourself” response to the YC Dropbox page.
Yes, but good, standardized developer tooling is valuable.
Postman could’ve also been a “just use CURL and dump to JSON” for example.
I actually am bullish on this. Tmux and ssh are somewhat clunky and probably under utilized by most people. I struggle to find commands, navigate sessions, see history, and so on.
Also in an “agent” based world where you might ask an agent to execute things for you, how do you manage that context well beyond just giving it its own Tmux session to drive?
It’s a good idea, and I’m surprised no one’s built it sooner.
Devs don't use Dropbox, they use git. Git is probably the poster-child example of an unfriendly interface, and yet it's the standard way for devs to share files.
Emacs is downright friendly compared to git & tmux IMO.
Care to share your setup? I'm currently working on pretty much the same thing and it's looking good so far, but having a single user makes it hard to get enough feedback.
Hmmm, it's a fairly stock emacs setup. Most of the weird/specific stuff is outside of emacs: setting up a sandbox, managing worktrees, managing disk space because each worktree can easily contain 200GiB of build artifacts, et cetera.
The Emacs parts of it are all either stock or partially or fully broken.
I've got notification support but it's broken.
I'd love to use agent-shell because it's a much better way to interact with agents than using their stupid TUI's, but it's currently broken with Claude for me and is way behind the claude TUI.
So instead I use claude-code-ide.el inside of a ghostel, but it's got a large number of friction points. Mostly due to claude's broken TUI.
Sounds like you're using LLMs correctly IMO. The entire appeal of LLMs in dev-tooling is being able to setup hyper-specific, customized workflows and have "extensions" be done by telling the LLM what to fix. For that, the smaller and more minimal the base is, the better.
might be a related sneak peek here: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2079327969416482859
can't wait for more details!
My understanding: it’s like tmux but the session lives on a server instead of one machine and you can open it on your computer/phone/etc
The server being their server that you eventually have to a pay a subscription to use? Hmm..
Also, interesting permission problems. Are you going to allow a remote server owned by someone else have shell access to all of your computers? Are they allowed to train an LLM from all the things you type?
OT, but the superlogical browser tab icon gives me flashbacks (pun intended) to the flash player icon:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Adobe_Fl...
Funny. I started working on a similar product myself just a few days ago. I have multiple machines for multiple different purposes. Each one runs different agents (some local, some cloud), for different tasks. Different ones store different data (a NAS on one, my VMs on another, etc.). I wanted a durable layer over all of them to be able to start work on any one of them and resume on any other, and for all the disparate agents to share memory/configurations where possible, and for each node in the network to make all the others aware of its purpose (so when the NAS is online, the agents know how to connect to it and what it contains). Sadly no VC funding for me, building it on my lonesome :)
Sounds super interesting!
What's your approach?
Still exploring different options but at the moment I run a daemon on each node that connects via iroh to link the nodes (and NAT traversal). Once the link is established the nodes share data via a Raft-based datastore. I can launch a TUI client on any machine. This presents a chat interface like a typical LLM harness. From here I can configure which model I want to use, how the model is executed and on which node (for example I can use Ollama on machine A to serve a model that’s running on machine B, but executing commands via this system on machine C). Each daemon then acts like a typical LLM harness, but headless. So the commands and tool calls are streamed into the shared store and finally end up in my TUI. Since all the state is in the distributed store I can pick up the progress wherever I want, as long as there’s a node running there.
Still a lot of big problems like latency so I’m not too happy with the current design. It’s a LOT of state to replicate, and obviously things get problematic when an agent was working on a project on machine A but then ends up on machine B which doesn’t have that project directory around at all. So the agent needs to re-orient itself to figure out what happened. Still pretty fun to play with.
Interested in your choice of Raft. How well does that work when you have heterogeneous machines with varying degrees of latency to each other?
This is an incredible idea. I would usually be skeptical that such an engineering-focused tool would "make it," but Mitchell Hashimoto is one of the very few people I think can pull it off.
This is going to change so many things if it starts getting adopted.
Can you give me one concrete use case that explains how this is an incredible idea? Thanks
Initial impression is that is is a weird stew of ghostty mixed with all the things HashiCorp tried to do…
why you want to build new terminal multiplexer? Is there issues with current? tmux or zellij?
Still very interested. Especially if you will go further than terminal - multiplexer for window environment, not just in terminal
Well neither of those is backed by libghostty. They also aren't native. This multiplexer is a native application on macOS. Hopefully we see a native port for Windows and Linux too.
I love Ghostty. But I miss out on lots of its features because I use zellij exclusively to work with agents. This sounds exciting and I hope they'll choose some cliff oss license like gitbutler does
Zmx allows for similar features natively
I rely on tmux, sway, and AeroSpace for my daily life, so I think multiplexers are important. It's just that they're currently fragmented, and with Chrome, we have so many tools for organizing tabs and split-screen now. It would be great if Superlogical could solve all of this.
I use and prefer screen
I use tmux on windows and elsewhere when I must
They both have pluses and minuses, neither is perfect and both (yes even tmux) seem “old” in today’s world
There is definitely room for a next gen terminal multiplexer with all the built-in goodies we all want
I signed up
when is that large slab of color to the right of the site? it serves no purpose other than change color when scrolling...
That explains why he built sessions into libghostty instead of Ghostty itself. Looking forward to it.
I spend most of my time in the terminal and have been using tmux to manage my sessions and workspaces, mainly via sesh.
But recently, I decided to move to Kitty and use its built-in sessions instead. I built something around it as well. It’s still early, but I’m really liking this workflow so far.
https://github.com/alienxp03/kesh
Mother of all bikesheds, but... I didn't know I needed a mobile site with a scrollbar until now. Apple take note!
I like the concept. I maintain something similar [0], a daemon-backed supervisor where each task is one command in its own PTY (builds, servers, agent sessions), rather than a persistent shell workspace.
[0]: https://github.com/reagentX/fleetcom
> Funded by ... Tobias Lütke
Hmm, yeah - no thanks.
Was not familiar with the guy and this is certainly a take:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke#Voting_right...
Seems like everyone is doing similar... here's mine:
https://github.com/blmarket/hmux
Idea is to keep everything feel same with tmux, just add what's necessary for agent integrations.
The ease of implementation provided by AI tools makes this "work repetition" more likely. Humans are awful at coordination.
Anybody else using Superset as your multiplexer rn? I'm finding it quite useful but wondering if there are other existing products that I should consider -- Mac Silicon: https://superset.sh/ Curious to see what Superlogical cooks up.
I've never heard of that Superset. I've used the Apache business analytics one though: https://github.com/apache/superset. Unfortunate name collision...
Taking VC money to being a better (probably worse) tmux is the sort of clownworld stuff only people in the Thiel circle can come up with
What does tmux alone do way better than the newer tools?
Surely the opposite question makes more sense: what's the value add of newer tools?
I will admit that I've used https://herdr.dev/ before because unlike tmux, it displays the status of running LLM agents.
I have a lot of respect for Mitchellh but taking VC money for a tmux clone is wild.
As long as you are rich all the VCs will throw money at you.. fine.. but if you are rich then you don't have to take the VC money either. Just do it out of passion.
My take is that it will be tmux as a service. You will have many different sessions which will have their data stored in some central system (read: raft/etcd) and an API built on top of that for create/list/attach to sessions.
Ghostty is the client side aspect of this (the binary that actually runs on your laptop), but there will be a large backend system that the binary talks to through an API. With the API you can then also start automating sessions, for example when a metrics value trips an alert start an agent to triage with a session you can then attach to for further interrogation.
What Im not sure of is if they are going to build on top of kubernetes or not, which already provides a lot of the features necessary (etcd store, API server, workload orchestration, tenant isolation, extendable API).
(This is all speculation)
This sounds awesome enough to see if they're hiring, and they are, but unfortunately only in certain areas with an expectation to be in-office with some regularity. Bummer. Exciting to see this team together, though. This is a tool that I want and think about daily.
backed by tobi lutke? so, supervillain tech.
`ssh superlogical.jobs` gives me same vibe as telnet bbs when I was in college :)
Glad that they picked Los Angeles as one of their main office locations!
Commercializing and integrating (openclawing ?) cmux to take all the jerbs?
https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux
Meta: Not quite sure what they're up to, but I appreciate the unique and interesting site design.
I'm stealing that gradient-scrollbar
I came to say something similar. On mobile it looks really nice and matches the highlights elsewhere. Cool subtle visual effect.
This but software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergroup_(music)
Multibuffer program like Emacs but not Emacs. All for it.
My biggest token sink so far has been something very much like this, but I'm still not sure whether it's a good idea. But it has been a lot of fun.
is this the same thing as/related to https://superb.systems/ ?
https://go.superlogical.com --> https://superb.systems/
edit: aand someone fixed it :) I guess that must've been their older branding (it was a very beautiful website)
Can someone give me one concrete use case that explains what this does, and how it is useful/different? Thanks!
It's a multiplexer w/ distributed state. If you know about tmux then it's basically tmux but someone else can connect to the same session w/o logging on to the same computer. I can imagine it being useful for debugging production outages b/c several people can use a single "dashboard" for coordinating their work w/o having to go back & forth on slack/zoom/etc. You can ask any chat bot to explain further if you want to look into it: https://share.google/aimode/XadkUVcvpjlYhuWmK
I get the tmux part, but not the slack/zoom part. What does “for all work” mean technically?
The list of people on their announcement page have a track record that will probably answer your question.
Can’t say I’m following but wouldn’t bet against the guy
They're not hiring in EU remote? Barely managed to somehow open the links on my phone since I don't have my laptop around.
Anyone have any thoughts on how Herdr already addresses what they're building?
This sounds like 8-10 products combined into one! Really cool
Does anyone know how they’re monetizing it? Are they planning on selling the terminal multiplexer?
Congrats. Not entirely clear on the vision but most things he touches are great so am sure whatever they come out with will be good stuff.
Funded by Mario Zechner (pi.dev) among others.
So, at least 2 of some dudes.
ssh superlogical.jobs
This actually works!
Very cool to see a man execute on his vision. Ghostty -> libghostty -> terminal multiplexing -> ???
No remote jobs, bummer!
I dig that the jobs page is via ssh!
I didn't know what multiplexer mean, but it looks amazing
It’s interesting because in an ideal world he is practically building a NixOS config.
I’m pretty new to NixOS (a few months) but i could envision using Nix to declarativey configure tmux windows and panes in a dev shell. That said, Nix feels like it might still be too clunky at this point in time to quickly re-declare window and panel arrangements. But I never tried and it could be possible.
Kind of funny that he lists himself as "Creator of Ghostty" first and not Hashicorp.
"Why is terminal usage more widespread than ever?" - I guess because of AI agents?
call me an optimist, but I believe that more and more things are getting more viable to do from the terminal. tools like jj remove the need in Git GUI because mental model and UX gets streamlined, and the AI craze incentivizes practically every company to create their own CLI
What am I missing by not using a terminal multiplexer?
this is exactly the problem I found I had for my own agentic workflows and have been trying to solve on my own. excited to see what they come up with
This tracks
Good thesis. Bad form.
> We're building the multiplexer for all work.
Devs again thinking "work" is interchangeable with software engineering.
I am guessing Ghosty will become closer to Warp.
The post itself says that the effort is independent of ghostty. Their first work will utilize libghostty, and they'll contribute upstream.
In other words, this probably won't directly involve changes to ghostty.
Extremely excited for this as a tmux and Ghostty user. Given the team, I know a great deal of care will be taken in building this product.
> And as the work moves to production it lives behind separate systems and controls.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. With exceptions, I think wanting to change that is misguided and won't fly anyway.
Something like emacs?
Me literally searching for emacs in the webpage.
> We believe the missing layer is a durable session around the work itself
Curious as to how this will be different than K8s?
I'm curious from the other direction; where do you see overlap between k8s and what's described on the Superlogical website?
> For us, that means interactive work, automatic work, and production work would share one well-crafted underlying system instead of living in separate tools.
Unless this is only for the narrow band of purely local work, I would be surprised if k8s didn't play a big role in the backend solution. It is the standard "well-crafted underlying system" for automatic production work. But, it isn't strong in the interactive-work/frontend aspect or other aspects, so it certainly wouldn't be the main focus of the final product.
Random example: you want to multiplex some work across multiple (self-hosted) agents, using niche fine-tuned models. It would make good sense if those agents were automatically provisioned and deprovisioned (and isolated to your subtenant), and k8s is a great underlying system for that sort of thing.
Doesn't K8s already practically provide a layer of abstraction across all infrastructure? You might not think of it as being a session, but to the degree that it's responsible for managing scaling and failover, it kind of is.
This isn't a statement of value, I'm genuinely curious myself. In fact, I bet this new thing will probably be better.
This sounds like given a coherent structure to “I want the prod code here to change the retry policy so pending retries are held in memory in this edge layer instead of the DB writers so load can be shed more cheaply” and it will usher things in from coding, testing, filing tickets, getting prod approvals, using the deploy tools to respond the containers, smoke testing the deploy, looking at Datadog or whatever to ensure the change is having the desired effect. All in one context, the tools and dev/qa/prod systems naturally being orchestrated within the same environment/ session. K8s is just the next to last 100 meters.
domain could be very good for some relevant AI startup and not multiplexer..
i just have log.md that keeps a running log of things as i work though a project. thats all my claude code needs to navigate 'session' across systems.
"Any sufficiently VC-funded AI startup will inevitably try to re-invent a log.md file" - Spongebob Squarepants
Its hilarious how everyone in the comments is like "Look I built the same thing"
Ya'll really need to checkout that 15 year old talk from Peter Thiel about not building the same thing as everyone else. LLMs have destroyed problem solving, creative thinking in general. Why don't you people actually solve problems that matter and are original rather than making the equivalent of nvim configurations of the llm era?
> LLMs have destroyed problem solving, creative thinking in general.
People probably had just as many uncreative ideas before, but lacked the ability to execute on them. Remember the "idea guys" constantly looking for tech cofounders to build their "brilliant" visions? Now, LLMs have given them the ability to execute.
I have no idea what this is but I appreciate the roster.
Dam it, he did it again. Amazing guy.
Bloomberg terminal dead soon
> Sessions can be accessed through the web and native macOS/iOS applications
...only native macOS/iOS applications. Not a good look.
So excited to see what this dream team cooks!
Definitely a missing piece in the ecosystem. Happy to hear it will have first class support for web or GUI.
tmux but with sane UX/controls being usable by non-vim binding people is important.
Sounds a bit like the do all the things of Google Wave.
How can I get points in the company?
the careers page is just `ssh superlogical.jobs` which is kinda cool
We're a team that has spent our entire careers building some of the most widely used developer tooling, infrastructure software, and AI systems.
Not being snarky. What AI systems have they built?
One of the cofounders is formerly from poolside (poolside.ai), where they produce open-weight coding models. One of their recent models, Laguna, got quite a bit of attention here on HN.
The one they’re currently building. This has to be an agent orchestration and management play.
> We will build a high-quality terminal multiplexer that remains excellent at that job, even as it grows to support the second and third parts of the plan.
why this feels the next step is data collection and Ads?
Would you pay for it to not have data collections and ads?
Literally everything Mitchell does is top notch. Looking forward to seeing how this turns out!
This was just a pitch to VCs to collect a 10 million dollars because they don't know the difference between up and down and when say terminal multiplexer for the AI age they ask for your wire info.
The people here are a who's who of bad software. I expect horrible things. (if you haven't experienced the abomination of everything hashicorp made you should not downvote me here)
Can someone explain as pi as a harness vs Claude Code or OpenCode?
People keep saying "yeah, it's customizable!", but I can't be bothered doing that.
another IDE for AI harnesess?
https://xkcd.com/1406/
I'm sorry to take it out on this specific announcement, as it just seems to be one of many "offenders", but why are the 15 investors listed on an announcement blog post of a semi-stealth startup?
With most of them being VC or high-count angel investors, they can combined push whatever product is being built here into 200+ companies independent of whether it is good or not. What happened to the good old way of figuring out product market fit first? Is that the only way a product can succeed nowadays, or why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
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I'm excited to see what Superlogical will build, but the startup scene seems to grow more clique-y by the day.
Ghostty and libghostty was product market fit.
Superlogical (allegedly) uses it for the multiplexer.
Mitchell Hashimoto is just the icing on the cake and he has a track record of building defining dev tools used by millions of devs.
So it makes sense why you see 15 angel investors.
More money / investment in the dev tool space is great for everyone!
I'm not doubting that Mitchell Hashimoto is capable of building great products with great product market fit. Quite the opposite, as the few strands of idolization that exist within me rank him as one of the best to ever do it in the dev tooling space.
I'm also not doubting that there would be tons of investors throwing themselves at him for a new venture like this.
But why, apart from forced market access would it be in his interest to take that money, given that he can nicely fund it for a few years with ~1% of his net worth if not for forced market access?
1. Accountability - even very talented people can lose motivation or get distracted. Having investors to report to helps with this.
2. Recruiting - many people would be wary of working on a rich guy's pet project. Taking investment makes it more of a real company that has to deliver something and is not subject solely to the whims of one person.
I seriously doubt it is for the money.
It said they are funded, but it doesn't mean they lost control or have to be VC hyper growth. Apart from Notable Capital and Amplify Partners all others are individuals. There are lots of benefits having these group of company founders and CEO as investors. They are likely interested in the problem space as well.
Had it been hyper growth startup you would be looking at a16z or other bigger names.
yes, dev tooling investment has always been disappointing. Mainly due to stingy buyers.
"With most of them being VC or high-count angel investors, they can combined push whatever product is being built here into 200+ companies independent of whether it is good or not"
Ah, I see you have figured it out the thing that has always been the case.
I don't doubt that, but that phenomenon seems to be reaching egregious levels.
You are commenting that on a website where this is part of the value proposition since the early days, so I wouldn't say that's a new phenomenon.
I think the generous take would be...
- it demonstrates they have funding (pre-empting "no-one will fund something weird like this")
- its transparent and open (pre-empting "which bastards are the ones who really own it?")
> why else would a ~billionaire that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
Investors can be good for funding but they can also be good for education. Later, they're also very good for strategy.
> What happened to the good old way of figuring out product market fit first? Is that the only way a product can succeed nowadays
Generally it's very challenging. I have two products I'm building this way and you face a lot of up-hill climb where people with VC backing are getting the door opened for them. Of course, because of those same pressures to deliver and succeed, it's equally possible those same doors will eventually get closed on them.
I think Mitchell also lives in a bit of a bubble now. He went from friendly open source guy to very rich friendly open source guy. That's no knock on him, but I would consider viewing business from the perspective of someone who has been a CEO, CTO, and IC at the same company (his company) as his only job who became insanely wealthy as a result. I have a friend who has largely only worked in big tech, and successful startups, who tells me all the time level and salary don't matter to him. They don't matter to him because he found success early. Again, not a knock but sustained success will shape how you view the world and how you play the game.
It's really awkward when you consider projects like Bun, which were VC funded, and ultimately bought out by a large company, what would they have even done to pay back the VCs that funded them?
Of course they need VC money! How else are they gonna hire the worlds best vibe coders?
> I'm excited to see what Superlogical will build, but the startup scene seems to grow more clique-y by the day.
Insert "It always was" meme
> why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early
That was my question, too. Does Mitchell even need to take outside funding? I get why you would prefer to use others' poker chips instead of your own, especially if they're happy to give them to you, but usually funding comes with strings attached.
> why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
Something something "never spend your own money if you can spend someone else's money." That plus the perception of having those specific investors gives the idea/business fast authority/prestige.
It's not the gangster move, but it's a move.
I really wish mitchellh wouldn't take funding from some of these people. Tobias Lutke in particular has chronically been on the wrong side of fundamental issues, and has most recently advocated for a pay-to-play version of democracy where wealth determines your ability to participate (and in particular your "stake" in the democracy).
I also recoiled a bit when I say that Lutke was on the investors list.
It's really unfortunate that the same traits that make you great at building a business (within capitalism) also often make you have psychopathic tendencies.
Kind of says something about the system we've chosen to run our societies on, huh?
Now we’re ruled by an oligarchy of psychopaths and everyone’s wondering how this happened
Easy to say this when the original commenter incorrectly described Tobias' comments. He suggested that those who pay more in taxes should have a greater say in how the government is spending the money. This is not a crazy idea on its face; you could say that taken to the limit it would not be a good system to live in (the highest taxpayer dictating what gov't does).
But it does make sense that those who are footing the bill for everything might be consulted a little on the plans to spend.
reading "those who pay more in taxes should have a greater say in how the government is spending the money" and NOT taking that to mean what the OP is suggesting it to mean is naive. Everyone knows what Tobias meant when he said that.
> Tobias Lutke /../ has most recently advocated for a pay-to-play version of democracy where wealth determines your ability to participate
He’s just looking at america post Citizens United and wishing he could ull the same shenans in Canada. It’s been working very well for the folks and orgs who can afford it
People are only allowed to take funding from investors whose politics align with yours?
They stated their preference, not that there should be a rule to enforce their preference.
"I think this guy is dumb and wrong. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is going to have outsized influence on a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy may profit from a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is using his wealth to do dumb wrong things."
This is a normal and reasonable thought process.
Does Mitchell even need to take outside funding?
more info: https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
> Guillermo Rauch
This guy posted selfies with the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, did you really need his money?
https://x.com/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031
I’m sorry. I tried to understand what is this about, but I couldn’t. The title didn’t explain it. The description neither.
I remember I heard a saying somewhere that if you can explain what you are doing in a few simple sentences, then is is this really something valuable?
The vision of having a shared interface for all work seems pretty clear to me.
I’m sorry, what does it mean?
That describes a computer
It's just another AI gobbledygook product whose sole purpose for existing is to cash in on the hype bubble, a few years from now this'll just be another in a series of infinite other VC grifts
Blog post: https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
It sounds like they're building a super-root which can destroy your whole infrastructure at once ???
From their website:
"Building and operating software today spans local machines, remote hosts, sandboxes, services, and production systems. It has many modes of operation: interactively with a human developer, automatically through CI and background processes, and increasingly through agents working in parallel.
[...]
We believe the missing layer is a durable session around the work itself: one that can span applications and environments, provide relevant context by default, expose structured data and actions, preserve history, and be driven by software while remaining visible and controllable by people.
[...]
This is our plan to build a multiplexer for all work: 1 Build an incredible multiplexer. 2 Make everything in it composable. 3 Make it safe and operable in production"
It’s good to be skeptical, but this guy is the inventor of quite a bit of architecture software supporting modern systems
I think it’ll be fine
It’s a terminal multiplexer. Nothing in this announcement suggests to me that using this multiplexer will require the user to get root or super-root or any additional permissions. It’s what the user already has access to, but more “durable” (which I take a mean terminal session history on by default). And I don’t believe any short-lived secrets like ephemeral keys could have their lifetime extended by a terminal multiplexer. And nothing really supersedes RBAC which any respectable org should be using always.