Herdr is an open-source agent harness and orchestrator designed to coordinate, manage, and execute autonomous terminal-based AI coding workflows. Developed under the herdrdev organization, the tool acts as a control plane for AI agents, organizing tasks across isolated workspace groups and repositories. In daily operations, Herdr manages agent lifecycles, scoped skill sets, and working trees directly from the command line. It delegates coding tasks to underlying agents and tools while enforcing boundary isolation across project workspaces. The platform incorporates terminal emulation capabilities—including native ConPTY support on Windows—to reliably run interactive terminal sessions, agent tooling, and environment scripts. Herdr differentiates itself by treating workspace management, skill definition, and agent orchestration as first-class infrastructure rather than simple process wrappers. By decoupling agent execution from the primary working directory via worktree and workspace group isolation, it prevents unintended side effects across development branches. Herdr is maintained as an open-source project on GitHub with build and packaging configurations for multiple environments, including Nix and Windows.
Tags: agent harness, ai agent, cli, coding agent, developer tools, OpenSource
.agents/skills. - Cross-Platform Terminal Emulation — Provides cross-platform terminal runtime handling, including modern ConPTY bundling for Windows environments. - Reproducible Environment Support — Integrates Nix configurations for reproducible developer environments and deterministic dependency management. - Editor and Tooling Integrations — Compatible with modern developer environments, terminal workflows, and language servers including Zed..agents/skills that agents can execute during automated tasks. Herdr scopes and invokes these skills during task execution to standardize linting, testing, and release prep procedures.Herdr is built for software engineers and development teams who run terminal-based coding agents across complex codebases and need robust workspace isolation and skill orchestration. It is not intended for users looking for lightweight single-file chat interfaces or basic autocomplete IDE plugins.
bash # Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr.git cd herdr # Build and run using Nix flakes (if Nix is installed) nix build # Or build from source with standard Rust toolchain cargo build --releasebash # Initialize workspace configuration in your project root herdr init # Check agent skill registrations herdr skills listbash # Execute a task across a managed workspace group herdr run --workspace feature-refactor "Migrate internal auth handlers to new interface"Part of CLI Coding Agents
Categories: AI Coding Agents, Code Assistants, Developer Tools