if agents continue to get better with RL, what is future proof about this environment or UI?
I think we all know that managing 5-10 agents ... is not pretty. Are we really landing good PRs with 100% cognitive focus from 5-10 agents? Chances are, I'm making mistakes (and I assume other humans are too)? Why not 1 agent managing 5-10 agents for you? And so on?
Most of the development loop is in bash ... so as long as agents get better at using bash (amongst other things), what happens to this in 6 months?
I don't think this is operating at a higher-level of abstraction if agents themselves can coordinate agents across worktrees, etc.
onecommit 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting thoughts - thank you! And directionally agree - given that agents are becoming ever better, they'll take more and more of the orchestration on themselves. Still, we believe that developers need an interface to interact with these agents; see their status and review / test their work. Emdash is our approach for building this interface of the future - the ADE :)
blumomo 1 hours ago [-]
> Still, we believe that developers need an interface to interact with these agents;
CLIs like claude code equally improve over time. tmux helps running remote sessions like there were local.
Why should we invest long time into your „ADE“, really?
> see their status and review / test their work
Won’t that be addressed eventually by the CLIs themselves?
Maybe you’re betting on being purchased by one of the agentic coding providers given your tool has long term value on its own?
nemooperans 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ttoinou 1 hours ago [-]
So, what's your business model ? Is this an YC product, or a tool you developed while working on a YC product ?
onecommit 1 hours ago [-]
We're figuring our business model out. There're two avenues that we principally think about (1) bundled coding agent subscription and (2)enterprise version with auth, team management, sharing of agent interactions. Admittedly, it's early and this can change. What won't change is that this UI layer for running multiple coding agents is and will be open-source. Emdash itself is funded by YC. Initially developed as a tool while working on another product, but we weren't funded then.
ttoinou 1 hours ago [-]
(2) sounds like a great idea if you can ensure private company data never reaches your servers, with features like remote controlling agents from a central place
onecommit 1 hours ago [-]
Thank you, and yes!
haimau 3 hours ago [-]
Been driving my agents (CC, currently testing Pi) for a couple of weeks via Emdash. Finally, got a productive worktree setup working. There were still rough edges when I started, but the team has shipping fast [0] and is vaporizing concerns on the fly. Building on top of the native CLI seems to be the right strategy as well.
the worktree pre-warming detail is interesting -- keeping a reserve pool and letting new tasks claim one instantly is the same pattern as connection pool pre-warming in databases. the underlying bottleneck is probably git having to traverse pack files and update the index when you run 'git worktree add'. one thing worth trying if you haven't: sparse checkout on the worktrees can cut that initialization time further, especially in large monorepos where most files are irrelevant to a given agent task.
onecommit 2 hours ago [-]
interesting! hadn't looked into sparse checkout before, but will do now. Initial thoughts are that sparse might be risky if we lose some arbitrary files that might be relevant context for the coding agents. Will look into this!
bketelsen 2 hours ago [-]
this looks great, but can't test, the .deb package is broken with an issue about NODE_MODULE_VERSION mismatches. There seems to be a PR waiting for approval. Will keep an eye on it.
arnestrickmann 18 minutes ago [-]
Hey! We pushed a fix for this. Let us know how it goes!
1 hours ago [-]
onecommit 1 hours ago [-]
looking into this! Thanks for flagging
FiloVenturini 3 hours ago [-]
Have you considered adding any kind of agent coordination layer, e.g. letting one “orchestrator” agent spawn and direct sub-agents on specific subtasks, rather than having the developer manually assign each task? Or is the explicit human-in-the-loop assignment a deliberate design choice to keep control and avoid runaway costs?
onecommit 3 hours ago [-]
We've considered it! The way we're seeing it, this is something that the CLIs themselves are getting good at natively, such as Claude Code. We generally consider ourselves to be at a higher abstraction / task level, where the individual CLIs are responsible themselves for breaking down and distributing a larger task across subagents.
martinald 55 minutes ago [-]
Please codesign your Windows installer exes :)
onecommit 51 minutes ago [-]
On it! Released windows out of beta yesterday. signed version sometime this week
martinald 40 minutes ago [-]
Thanks. Btw, doesn't work at all for me. I installed, tried to connect to my WSL2 instance on localhost via SSH, which worked. Selected a folder and got Claude Code is not installed (it is very much installed :)).
Grabbed the version before and got "PTY unavailable: ... was compiled against a different Node.js version using NODE_MODULE_VERSION 127, this version requires NODE_MODULE_VERSION 123".
Hope you can fix the bugs. I love Conductor on my Mac, but I need something for my WSL2 machine. Ideally Windows which can SSH into WSL2 (for UI speed) or runs on Linux itself. This is very close to what I need if you fix the bugs :).
das-bikash-dev 4 hours ago [-]
How does Emdash handle state management when running multiple agents on the same codebase? Particularly interested in how you prevent conflicts when agents are making concurrent modifications to dependencies or config files. Also, does it support custom agent wrappers, or do you require the native CLI?
onecommit 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks for your questions! You can separate the agents in Emdash by running them on separate git worktrees so they can do concurrent modifications without interfering. We don't support custom agent wrappers currently, interesting. Have you written your own? What is your use case for them over native CLIs?
esafak 4 hours ago [-]
> Each agent runs as a task in its own git worktree
If you're talking about shared services, that's another matter.
timsuchanek 3 hours ago [-]
Let's go! Love that this is a solid OSS alternative to what's already out there!
straydusk 2 hours ago [-]
Pretty sick. How do you compare yourself with Conductor?
onecommit 2 hours ago [-]
Conductor is definitely in the same space. Main points of differentiation that I am aware of are that we allow you to connect to remote servers via SSH, natively embed many more coding agents (21) with their full functionality, and are open-source.
ahmetd 32 minutes ago [-]
very cool!
thesiti92 3 hours ago [-]
i'll have to give it a shot, the market needs an open source cursor right now
onecommit 3 hours ago [-]
great! send all feedback our way :folded_hands:
selridge 3 hours ago [-]
Looks cool! Thank you for sharing.
ahmadyan 3 hours ago [-]
Congrats on the launch
leondri17 2 hours ago [-]
LFG!
redrove 3 hours ago [-]
Is this another VSCode fork? I can’t tell from the readme.
onecommit 3 hours ago [-]
Not in its purest sense! We're using the monaco editor for file editor and diffs, but other than that no VScode included. The file editor is really a secondary view inside of Emdash. The focus is on the chat with the coding agent. We'll make this more clear in the readme. Thanks for the feedback!
umairnadeem123 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 23:02:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
if agents continue to get better with RL, what is future proof about this environment or UI?
I think we all know that managing 5-10 agents ... is not pretty. Are we really landing good PRs with 100% cognitive focus from 5-10 agents? Chances are, I'm making mistakes (and I assume other humans are too)? Why not 1 agent managing 5-10 agents for you? And so on?
Most of the development loop is in bash ... so as long as agents get better at using bash (amongst other things), what happens to this in 6 months?
I don't think this is operating at a higher-level of abstraction if agents themselves can coordinate agents across worktrees, etc.
CLIs like claude code equally improve over time. tmux helps running remote sessions like there were local.
Why should we invest long time into your „ADE“, really?
> see their status and review / test their work
Won’t that be addressed eventually by the CLIs themselves?
Maybe you’re betting on being purchased by one of the agentic coding providers given your tool has long term value on its own?
[0] https://github.com/generalaction/emdash/releases/
Then tried running the Linux version on WSL2 (not ideal because the wayland server on WSL2 is slow) - doesn't work. This 404s: https://github.com/generalaction/emdash/releases/download/v0...
Grabbed the version before and got "PTY unavailable: ... was compiled against a different Node.js version using NODE_MODULE_VERSION 127, this version requires NODE_MODULE_VERSION 123".
Hope you can fix the bugs. I love Conductor on my Mac, but I need something for my WSL2 machine. Ideally Windows which can SSH into WSL2 (for UI speed) or runs on Linux itself. This is very close to what I need if you fix the bugs :).
If you're talking about shared services, that's another matter.