At first glance, it looks similar to Conductor (https://www.conductor.build/). It seems like a lot of these tools are converging on the same general ideas.
Could you share a comparison with the other tools out there?
Note that Anthropic specifically called out that usage through Conductor will be metered as "programmatic usage" in their June 15th pricing change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126438
yeah there is a lot of overlap, we are more terminal first than conductor so you can do can use any cli agent you want. We have a lot more quality of life features around the terminal like notifications, and some things similar to tmux where if you kill the app or update your sessions stay alive and running. We also recently released remote workspaces so you can setup cloud workspaces for your agents. Id say if you like the chat experience conductor is still a bit more polished, we'll get to that level of polish soon, but if you care more about the terminal and cloud and more new integrations we are shipping superset is better.
I've been using this for the past few months, and I love it! It's built exactly around my workflow with many worktrees in various repos open at the same time, sometimes with different agents working side-by-side. Before Superset I just used terminal tabs but simply couldn't manage more than like 20 terminal tabs without losing track, so i coudn't scale further. Now i'm running probably 40-50 agent sessions over several repos simultaneously without any issues and losing track!
Keep up the good work guys!
Could you elaborate a little on what you are doing with 40-50 agents? I use Claude, I've employed sub-agents, but I still can't wrap my head around how people are using them to that extent.
And headless server support! I have gotten a lot of request to let people run the agent on a separate dev box (in the cloud or some pc gathering dust in the corner). The frontend/backend are decoupled so you can run the agents on a totally separate machine than the GUI is running.
If you have any other problems/concerns/issues/suggestions/etc, reach out!
Just switched from Conductor to Superset and I'm a big fan. I really didn't like the extra stuff conductor added to the UX (the text rendering always drove me nuts).
So far so good with Superset - even as a non-engineer builder.
Nice. In the right track. I made something similar, but focused on local agents, but we both have issue tracking for managing multiple project and agents in parallel. It works, I think people will be surprised when they start using systems like this.
It is very different from current editors and the direction they are going in. In a way, it undermines the direction they are going. Current editors aim to make engineers 10x or 100x. These editors aim at a different target than the engineers. I will leave it to the imagination on who.
Also - one issue I've seen with other tools doing worktree stuff is they don't deal with merge conflicts automatically. IMO the agents should just automatically resolve conflicts & rebase on their own, is that a thing here?
I switched over to Superset from Conductor a few months ago and haven't looked back - it's really nice to be able to use the native Codex/Claude Code TUIs without any of the bloat
Kitty with oh-my-zsh, lazyvim and an agent. The entire thing is an ide. If I need to refactor, query data and interact with the system I just use native tools like rg+fastmod, bash, awk, jq... Either writing myself of asking an agent to do the heavy lifting.
Linux in the agent era is a breeze to operate and reason about, so the whole thing becomes a single development environment that's really light on resources and effective.
What I've started to do is to use Zulip. You can have different agents in different chats. You can upload files and you update from your mobile phone. At first I thought it was crazy but it's nice not to have 3 different AI agents running in tmux
That's an interesting take! Basically Linux / a computer is everything you need to ship code.
If I could provide one gentle pushback - the same way there's utility in OMZ, lazyvim etc., there may be utility in us shipping our CLI etc. - there must exist some software we can build that'll be useful to you as well :)
Yeah, how many agents can you people even run at once and how much does it cost you? In company we used the monthly token quota and nowadays it's basically unusable with claude opus 4.6 on high reasoning. You can basically burn through 100% usage through a single day. How does it even scale for you with N agents and which magical plans or models do you use, where tools like this are even viable?
It's nice to see people building things, but honestly I found the demo video a bit disappointing. A bit too slow, a bit too choppy, a bit hand wavy. It didn't make me grasp why I needed this in my life.
So far we've been growing pretty healthily all things considered!
I think one thing to remember is that the other side of us having dozens of competitors is that if the space couldn't sustain more than 1-2 parallel agent companies, a lot fewer of us would exist. We also will have a lot of time to continue creating value for our customers in the future in new ways :)
we monetize on teams and, in the future, cloud. the bet is that teams will want to centralize their set up for this type of work, especially shared Linear, GitHub, skills, etc.
This uses separate git worktrees. If we have a local dev setup involving multiple docker services, is there a recommended solution for managing those envs? I didn't see.
We have a concept of setup and teardown scripts if you're interested in checking them out! Together with worktrees, you can make it pretty automatic to making copies of your repo: https://docs.superset.sh/setup-teardown-scripts
Yes. Antigravity switched to primarily be an agent management tool (the previous version of the product became Antigravity IDE). Additionally, most advanced tools automatically spawn subagents.
biggest difference is it's terminal first, and optimized for CLI agents. we don't prescribe a specific harness and instead try to work with any CLI harness you bring.
is it terminal on steroids some kind of? so you can manage mutiple coding agents? how many coding agents you can manage in parallel that it is still comfortable to work and code changes are meaningful
yes, we surface agent states automatically so you can see what's running or needs attention across the different workspaces. there's a set of tasks where having 5-6 running in parallel is still productive for me such as running spikes and fixing small issue.
As we're investing more into integration test and self-validating for the agents we're able to increase the number without sacrificing quality.
On the docket! Right now the main thing we have enabled is the file system + terminals + ai agents through remote workspaces, but yes dev environments is definitely on the agenda :)
I used Superset for quite a while until a month ago. There were some annoying issues, with freezing and terminal not being rendered how it should be. And they did repeated fixes that didn't really solve it. Since I had work to do I moved on.
I installed Zellij on my server where most of work is happening and local machine and this works well for me. There are other issues I have now, but overall flow is fairly natural to what I am doing.
I liked that they did integrate a lot of agent workflow in Superset but my experience was that it would just take too many resources and especially with glitches, it wasn't worth it continuing. I had a period where i enjoyed working in it. It is vibe coded electron app, 2GB! is too much for this kind of app.
I just updated to their new version... it supposedly imported my projects but I can't find anything... so... I guess this is it.
sorry to hear about the issue. we really messed up on the performance and balancing that with more features. looking into the imported projects did no projects show up on the sidebar for you?
will continue working bugs and hope you'll give it a try later in the future when the product's more stable :)
yeah i think theres a lot of ux conventions that are starting to get figured out, but we do want to be different. At least right now most dont well support remote workspace, issue tracking, or review. I bet most of the current ux patterns will look very different in a year
That's fair! We do have more paid features (a slack integration, remote workspaces etc.) but yeah we haven't found the best balance for which tier to put each in for sure.
The FAQ says "Superset has a free tier. The source code is available on GitHub under Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2), so you can inspect and self-host it subject to the license terms." - what is self hosting in this context, isn't it a desktop app? Is this why it wants me to sign into something? What exactly am I signing in to?
So we also ship a cloud service along with Superset, which enables our Linear integration, Slack integration, and our multiplayer capabilities / remote workspaces.
When you sign in, you're signing into our cloud service!
Actually Cursor is starting to converge with us as we speak! You can look at their new agents mode (which is now their default for new users) as an example.
For what happens, in our heads the end goal is building a software factory where dozens to hundreds of agents are always running - something that nobody has nailed the experience for yet. Until that's a solved problem I hope we have room to grow and build!
yes, bad choice on my part. the origin was i was planning for it to be a superset of all your dev tools, not thinking about apache superset at all since it was a different domain
Fair pushback! The space will settle down eventually, it's just clear to a lot of people that there's a lot of value to be created in this space that hasn't been created yet :)
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
At first glance, it looks similar to Conductor (https://www.conductor.build/). It seems like a lot of these tools are converging on the same general ideas.
Could you share a comparison with the other tools out there?
Note that Anthropic specifically called out that usage through Conductor will be metered as "programmatic usage" in their June 15th pricing change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126438
yeah there is a lot of overlap, we are more terminal first than conductor so you can do can use any cli agent you want. We have a lot more quality of life features around the terminal like notifications, and some things similar to tmux where if you kill the app or update your sessions stay alive and running. We also recently released remote workspaces so you can setup cloud workspaces for your agents. Id say if you like the chat experience conductor is still a bit more polished, we'll get to that level of polish soon, but if you care more about the terminal and cloud and more new integrations we are shipping superset is better.
When you say “terminal first”, are you terminal-first enough that I could use vim buffers for editing?
yes, it's essentially a terminal with extra agent hooks tracked and more customized review flow. if it runs in a terminal it runs in Superset.
I've been using this for the past few months, and I love it! It's built exactly around my workflow with many worktrees in various repos open at the same time, sometimes with different agents working side-by-side. Before Superset I just used terminal tabs but simply couldn't manage more than like 20 terminal tabs without losing track, so i coudn't scale further. Now i'm running probably 40-50 agent sessions over several repos simultaneously without any issues and losing track! Keep up the good work guys!
Could you elaborate a little on what you are doing with 40-50 agents? I use Claude, I've employed sub-agents, but I still can't wrap my head around how people are using them to that extent.
awesome to hear this! 40-50 is definitely on the high end. Are you adding any workflow on top to manage that many?
glad to hear it! thank you!
Wow - this looks like a fork of my project https://github.com/frenchie4111/harness
It's crazy to see how we have independently landed in the same place
Good luck to your project! Excited to see how our projects differ in the future
Amazing, this is exactly what I've been looking for a while now, especially the remote dev box part. I'll give it a try, thank you!
Looks great, even has Linux support!
And headless server support! I have gotten a lot of request to let people run the agent on a separate dev box (in the cloud or some pc gathering dust in the corner). The frontend/backend are decoupled so you can run the agents on a totally separate machine than the GUI is running.
If you have any other problems/concerns/issues/suggestions/etc, reach out!
Just switched from Conductor to Superset and I'm a big fan. I really didn't like the extra stuff conductor added to the UX (the text rendering always drove me nuts).
So far so good with Superset - even as a non-engineer builder.
Nice. In the right track. I made something similar, but focused on local agents, but we both have issue tracking for managing multiple project and agents in parallel. It works, I think people will be surprised when they start using systems like this.
It is very different from current editors and the direction they are going in. In a way, it undermines the direction they are going. Current editors aim to make engineers 10x or 100x. These editors aim at a different target than the engineers. I will leave it to the imagination on who.
thanks! yeah we daily drive superset so it definitely has been working for us, and yeah these tools are gonna end up looking pretty interesting :)
Why Mac only?
Also - one issue I've seen with other tools doing worktree stuff is they don't deal with merge conflicts automatically. IMO the agents should just automatically resolve conflicts & rebase on their own, is that a thing here?
Why support each agent individually instead of using ACP and get much better agent coverage?
I switched over to Superset from Conductor a few months ago and haven't looked back - it's really nice to be able to use the native Codex/Claude Code TUIs without any of the bloat
Can't wait to see what else you guys cook up!
That’s awesome to hear!
Definitely some exciting stuff coming with better automations, mobile and remote workspaces
Personally, IDE for the agent era is just Linux.
Kitty with oh-my-zsh, lazyvim and an agent. The entire thing is an ide. If I need to refactor, query data and interact with the system I just use native tools like rg+fastmod, bash, awk, jq... Either writing myself of asking an agent to do the heavy lifting.
Linux in the agent era is a breeze to operate and reason about, so the whole thing becomes a single development environment that's really light on resources and effective.
What I've started to do is to use Zulip. You can have different agents in different chats. You can upload files and you update from your mobile phone. At first I thought it was crazy but it's nice not to have 3 different AI agents running in tmux
That's an interesting take! Basically Linux / a computer is everything you need to ship code.
If I could provide one gentle pushback - the same way there's utility in OMZ, lazyvim etc., there may be utility in us shipping our CLI etc. - there must exist some software we can build that'll be useful to you as well :)
Is anyone actually using agent swarms for anything real?
Yeah, how many agents can you people even run at once and how much does it cost you? In company we used the monthly token quota and nowadays it's basically unusable with claude opus 4.6 on high reasoning. You can basically burn through 100% usage through a single day. How does it even scale for you with N agents and which magical plans or models do you use, where tools like this are even viable?
It's nice to see people building things, but honestly I found the demo video a bit disappointing. A bit too slow, a bit too choppy, a bit hand wavy. It didn't make me grasp why I needed this in my life.
How do you guys plan to sustain the business, given that your product here is open source & already has many competitors doing similar things?
So far we've been growing pretty healthily all things considered!
I think one thing to remember is that the other side of us having dozens of competitors is that if the space couldn't sustain more than 1-2 parallel agent companies, a lot fewer of us would exist. We also will have a lot of time to continue creating value for our customers in the future in new ways :)
we monetize on teams and, in the future, cloud. the bet is that teams will want to centralize their set up for this type of work, especially shared Linear, GitHub, skills, etc.
This uses separate git worktrees. If we have a local dev setup involving multiple docker services, is there a recommended solution for managing those envs? I didn't see.
We have a concept of setup and teardown scripts if you're interested in checking them out! Together with worktrees, you can make it pretty automatic to making copies of your repo: https://docs.superset.sh/setup-teardown-scripts
Ours are a bit complex but here's an example: https://github.com/superset-sh/superset/tree/main/.superset
I'd love a comparison to what's already out there. Don't vscode, antigravity, cursor etc all have agents too?
Yes. Antigravity switched to primarily be an agent management tool (the previous version of the product became Antigravity IDE). Additionally, most advanced tools automatically spawn subagents.
biggest difference is it's terminal first, and optimized for CLI agents. we don't prescribe a specific harness and instead try to work with any CLI harness you bring.
Windddddddoooowwwwwssssss
is it terminal on steroids some kind of? so you can manage mutiple coding agents? how many coding agents you can manage in parallel that it is still comfortable to work and code changes are meaningful
yes, we surface agent states automatically so you can see what's running or needs attention across the different workspaces. there's a set of tasks where having 5-6 running in parallel is still productive for me such as running spikes and fixing small issue.
As we're investing more into integration test and self-validating for the agents we're able to increase the number without sacrificing quality.
I agree with the hard part being managing state, especially environments and ports. I've never used lsof so much in my life.
Question on Remote Workspace: Can the remote machine port forward so I can use a browser to see / test current state of the app on the remote machine?
On the docket! Right now the main thing we have enabled is the file system + terminals + ai agents through remote workspaces, but yes dev environments is definitely on the agenda :)
Binding the shell <-> local git clone automatically feels like the future. Great work.
thanks! give it a try :) https://github.com/superset-sh/superset
I used Superset for quite a while until a month ago. There were some annoying issues, with freezing and terminal not being rendered how it should be. And they did repeated fixes that didn't really solve it. Since I had work to do I moved on.
I installed Zellij on my server where most of work is happening and local machine and this works well for me. There are other issues I have now, but overall flow is fairly natural to what I am doing.
I liked that they did integrate a lot of agent workflow in Superset but my experience was that it would just take too many resources and especially with glitches, it wasn't worth it continuing. I had a period where i enjoyed working in it. It is vibe coded electron app, 2GB! is too much for this kind of app.
I just updated to their new version... it supposedly imported my projects but I can't find anything... so... I guess this is it.
sorry to hear about the issue. we really messed up on the performance and balancing that with more features. looking into the imported projects did no projects show up on the sidebar for you?
will continue working bugs and hope you'll give it a try later in the future when the product's more stable :)
zed , orca , /.+mux.*/ , ...
they all look incredibly / increasingly the same?
yeah i think theres a lot of ux conventions that are starting to get figured out, but we do want to be different. At least right now most dont well support remote workspace, issue tracking, or review. I bet most of the current ux patterns will look very different in a year
No linear integration in free version and taxing it 20$/m is a bit steep.
That's fair! We do have more paid features (a slack integration, remote workspaces etc.) but yeah we haven't found the best balance for which tier to put each in for sure.
The FAQ says "Superset has a free tier. The source code is available on GitHub under Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2), so you can inspect and self-host it subject to the license terms." - what is self hosting in this context, isn't it a desktop app? Is this why it wants me to sign into something? What exactly am I signing in to?
So we also ship a cloud service along with Superset, which enables our Linear integration, Slack integration, and our multiplayer capabilities / remote workspaces.
When you sign in, you're signing into our cloud service!
Got you, thanks. So if I don't need those things I can skip the sign-in?
Ah unfortunately not through the hosted product, but if you fork and build it you should be able to skip the sign-in
How does this compare to Cursor?
What happens if Cursor makes the exact same features as your product?
Actually Cursor is starting to converge with us as we speak! You can look at their new agents mode (which is now their default for new users) as an example.
For what happens, in our heads the end goal is building a software factory where dozens to hundreds of agents are always running - something that nobody has nailed the experience for yet. Until that's a solved problem I hope we have room to grow and build!
I thought this was somehow related to Apache Superset.
https://superset.apache.org/
Ah actually we're unaffiliated!
Confusing name. Superset is already an established analytics tool.
yes, bad choice on my part. the origin was i was planning for it to be a superset of all your dev tools, not thinking about apache superset at all since it was a different domain
How many "IDEs for the agentic era" do we need?
As many as we can new idea's from and figure out how to do this more efficiently. It's ok to stick with vim, of course!
Fair pushback! The space will settle down eventually, it's just clear to a lot of people that there's a lot of value to be created in this space that hasn't been created yet :)
We live in this era when folks can vibecode entire startups without ever making a simple Google Search.
https://github.com/apache/superset
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Always preferred the name Caravel...
yeah I was confused coming across this headline - "Huh? Apache Superset is doing a Launch HN?"