// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Connecting the Machines
The next step for Herdr is connecting the machines.
Herdr already has more than 700,000 downloads and close to 1,000 plugins. There is a big community behind it, with people using it to manage their agents and their local machines.
Herdr already has --remote, so you can attach to a remote machine. As agents run for multiple hours, sometimes you want them on a machine that stays alive 24/7. You don’t want to keep your laptop open just because an agent is still working.
I think we’re also starting to think about our laptops as clients, instead of relying on them for all the compute. For a lot of us, it makes more sense to run a beefy machine somewhere else than spend a couple thousand dollars on the laptop we carry around. You could have a VPS, a Mac mini in your own setup, or both.
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.
People have been asking for this for months. There are already community workarounds, thanks to Herdr’s plugin system and some amazing contributors. But Herdr itself wasn’t built to support it.
Multiplexers like tmux and Zellij don’t support one TUI client managing independent servers across machines. That was a niche use case. Agents are changing that. Now we want to run agents anywhere and control them from wherever we are.
Herdr already had a client and a server, but one client attached to one server. Everything you saw in Herdr was rendered on that server. Bringing multiple servers into that setup would have meant making one server aggregate all those connections, or changing where the UI lived.
I wanted the client to bring those machines together, while each server kept running its own terminals and agents. That meant changing how Herdr itself was built. That’s why this took longer than I expected.
With 0.9, Herdr’s outer UI is rendered on the client. The servers still own their sessions and supply the terminal views. The client can now bring those independent servers into the same TUI, instead of attaching to one server’s entire interface.