Herdr's new desktop app lets your coding agent redesign its own UI
Herdr open-sourced herdr-core, a background runtime that keeps coding-agent sessions alive across restarts, plus a desktop app whose panels and keybindings are plain files your agent can rewrite.
Herdr, a terminal app for running Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents, has released a native desktop app alongside herdr-core, a new standalone runtime it sits on. The app, herdr-core and the original Herdr TUI are all open source under Apache 2.0, announced by the Herdr team on 29 October.
Agents run inside herdr-core rather than inside the window itself, so closing the app, updating it or hitting a crash doesn’t kill a running session. Every terminal is still there when you reopen it. The app runs on macOS on Apple silicon, Linux on x86_64 and arm64, and Windows on x86_64, and can reach remote machines of any OS over SSH. Its layouts, themes, keybindings and panels live as plain files under ~/.config/herdr-app, documented for agents in an AGENTS.md file, so you describe the change you want and your own coding agent edits the UI directly, no rebuild required. The TUI keeps its own server and doesn’t share sessions with the new app.
Why it matters: most coding-agent tools still treat the interface as something only the vendor can change. Herdr is betting that the agent you’re already running is the right tool to reconfigure its own host, which is a different design bet than the usual settings panel.
The caveat: the new app has no tagged GitHub release yet, only the website build and the announcement itself, so treat it as an early cut.