Connecting the Machines

(herdr.dev)

25 points | by collinmanderson 1 hour ago

6 comments

  • evanpurkhiser 8 minutes ago
    I’ve been running codex’s remote app server as a systemd service for the last several months, and before that opencode remote. It’s very easy to switch between my phone and desktop app.

    I haven’t tried herdr yet, but maybe it’s just not targeted at me?

    The real problem I have with the remote codex setup is when it needs to authenticate as me. I sort of solved this for sudo and ssh with this [1], but I think something like this could be integrated deeper into the harness

    [1]: https://github.com/evanpurkhiser/agent-witness

  • CharlesW 27 minutes ago
    I'm hoping someone can explain why this is interesting.

    I get that Herdr wants investors to give them money to own developers' coding sessions, but the value proposition ("Walk away and they keep working. Come back from any machine and they're where you left them.") seems like a miss since it's so easy to do that without them.

    I'm surely missing something.

  • hext 30 minutes ago
    This is fantastic to see, I've been daily driving herdr at work and at home for a few months now. It's great. My biggest complaint has been exactly this, I want all of my ssh sessions available in one spot. Excited to try it out.
  • evil-olive 17 minutes ago
    > But until now, each machine needed a separate Herdr client, usually in a different terminal tab. You had to remember where each agent was running and switch between those tabs to check on them. That was the bottleneck.

    is it, though?

    I can imagine having a local Herdr instance and one running on a remote box somewhere, but I can't think of a use case where I'm trying to juggle N different Herdr instances and that overhead becomes a meaningful bottleneck.

    > Getting to 1.0

    > After this update, what I want is to make connecting those machines more convenient. You shouldn’t need to think about SSH or deal with complicated network setup. It should be easy to connect any machine, anywhere, through one Herdr account.

    (emphasis added)

    sigh. I'm a daily user of Herdr. I don't have a Herdr account today. I don't want a Herdr account. I don't need a Herdr account.

    the product is not even to 1.0 yet and already the writing is on the wall for the path towards enshittification & acquisition by $bigco.

    of course, I'm sure there will be some "usage without an account will still work" platitudes, but the trend of development is clearly going to be in the direction of features that "integrate" with the "developers using Herdr pay us money and/or we collect their data" business model.

  • ahknight 47 minutes ago
    Why would I want a service for this when I could easily run such a discovery service myself? Why not just release that tool to users? SyncThing offers its discovery server for self-hosting as an example.

    Oh, right, this is how we monetize in 2026. Nevermind.

    • hext 27 minutes ago
      As they explicitly state in the docs, there is no reason to use their cloud service if the machines are accessible to each other via SSH.
  • ActionHank 42 minutes ago
    I am not sure I fully understand the need to farm out sufficient work that I need a network of machines to do it. Unless you're just slop farming.
    • hext 29 minutes ago
      You don't understand why some people might have multiple machines they connect to at any given time?