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▲Show HN: Baton – A desktop app for developing with AI agentsgetbaton.dev
55 points by tordrt 5 hours ago | 44 comments
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mellosouls 2 hours ago [-]
Best of luck with this but I think with so many open source agent managers cropping up, you are going to need to provide very special USP to have people choose yours over the free and open versions.

I guess I would suggest that should be a priority for your site and documentation, to help devs understand what that value offer is.

Your site does seem nicely presented though and clarity in capability is possibly an early win over some of the more chaotic documentation elsewhere.

KronisLV 1 hours ago [-]
> Best of luck with this but I think with so many open source agent managers cropping up

What’s the top 5 (or any N) that come to mind:

A) GUI based

B) terminal based

C) web based?

Like, not just personal projects but something with a bit of a community around it? I remember Conductor from a bit ago (seems only Mac is supported) and a few other HN posts but all of those seemed smaller and more barebones. Oh I guess OpenCode also has a desktop and web version, but it never worked well for me (and I need something that can just use headless Claude Code instances).

Asking because I just use Claude Code desktop for organizing my sessions and am a bit behind in that regard - if there are indeed many options that others can vouch for somewhat, I’d love to hear about them!

Edit: apparently there is Cmux (Mac only), T3 Code (very new), Agent Orchestrator (tries to be a weird kanban board), Agor (tries to be a weird canvas board) and Claude Squad (TUI only), but none of those are quite what I'm looking for. If there's all that many options, I might have missed most of them - since Baton or OpenCode (a revisit of it) seem more like what I'd be looking for, maybe Conductor if not Mac only.

mellosouls 15 minutes ago [-]
Oh-my-Claude and oh-my-codex (same creators) seem to be popular. The latter was used for the immediate ports of the Claude leak to python and rust.

https://github.com/instructkr/claw-code

Here's the oh-my-openagent that is also name checked in the link above:

https://ohmyopenagent.com/

tordrt 2 hours ago [-]
I appreciate the feedback!
riskable 3 hours ago [-]
How can people afford to use Claude Code like this‽ Is everyone just playing with it on their employer's dime or what?
myleshenderson 1 hours ago [-]
I have two claude code subscriptions: a team plan through my employer and I'm paying for the $200/month plan outside of that.

Trading $200/month of my money for the ability to build all of the things I've been thinking about for years is a great trade for me. I've built more things for fun/potential profit in the last year than I did in the previous decade combined.

And of course, one of the things I've built is a version of what OP made that works exactly how I want it to work. :)

michaelbuckbee 2 hours ago [-]
I build my own products and services and the effective ROI for paying for a more or less unlimited max Claude Code plan is fairly ridiculously positive.
Bombthecat 2 hours ago [-]
Like you make money with them?
techgnosis 2 hours ago [-]
This uses the CLIs so its using subscription pricing, not token pricing
electrovir 3 hours ago [-]
VC funding + spending more money on Claude instead of hiring more engineers
tordrt 2 hours ago [-]
200 dollars a month goes a long way with claude code
zephyrwhimsy 3 hours ago [-]
The observability stack (logs, metrics, traces) is often an afterthought but should be a first-class architectural concern. You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and you cannot debug what you cannot observe.
jeffrwells 3 hours ago [-]
I started building a similar project for myself, a terminal PTY running through a desktop daemon: https://youtu.be/6KY-HCn3SaA

The fun part being it worked on mobile too: https://youtube.com/shorts/CmemwDGwpx8?si=xzAJBb8ha7DLIDmY

It was more of a tool for myself but some interest from others inspired me so iterating on it. People interested in this kind of thing should join my slack! https://monetworkspace.com/terminal

kylex-ken 34 minutes ago [-]
I have not dove into the particulars, i'm assuming the agents do push/pull requests on your repo so no versioning issues.
BrandiATMuhkuh 2 hours ago [-]
Very cool. And congrats on the launch.

I started to use superset 2 days ago. Which seems similar. It's pretty nice: https://superset.sh

Fyi: here are some things I would like to have for such a tool - notification when an agent is done - each tabs/space has its own terminal, browser, agent - each tab/space runs in a sandbox (eg docker) - each tab/space can run my dev server. But must not conflict with the other dev servers running - each tab/space has a mcp server for the built in browser

Nice to have: - remote access against my machine/tabs - being able to make screenshots

ohnoesjmr 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm daft, I watched the video, and I just didn't understand what this is, or why I'd use it.

Seems like just tabs of claude code, plus markdown viewer which can just be another tab (with an editor) in a tabbed terminal?

My ide supports multiple terminal tabs, plus is a project aware code viewer, and has the ability to run the project.

What would I gain by using this?

sausajez 3 hours ago [-]
Please review the site design. Between the thin blue lines appearing & disappearing, and the "television static" in the background I gave up attempting to read anything in the first 30 seconds on the site because my eyes were drawn anywhere other than the content.
tordrt 2 hours ago [-]
Appreciate the feedback! Looking into it
ericol 1 hours ago [-]
This looks dangerously close to cmux but with a narrower focus (Just Claude code)

BTW, the claude app kind supports this with the /remote-control command, and that was what made me move away from cmux (I still have to start the sessions there)

kristianc 1 hours ago [-]
Theo's t3code does a lot of this for free I think. Interested to know if it uses the same trick for accessing Claude without violating their TOS.

https://t3.codes

electrovir 3 hours ago [-]
I've built my own as well, in a terminal. Not pretty, but does the job until something better comes along (maybe Baton is that something better): https://github.com/electrovir/agent-storm
causal 2 hours ago [-]
I'm confused, I've been running parallel agents on different worktrees within a single view of Claude Desktop for at least a month. I don't see any new features here?
MattDamonSpace 2 hours ago [-]
Fair but FWIW I love a GUI and I’m not gonna complain if everyone and their mother want to offer options

Let a thousand vibecoded flowers bloom

iamsaitam 1 hours ago [-]
Everyone's building the same thing nowadays ^^
ale 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t know how to phrase this without sounding like an arrogant idiot but seriously: what are people actually programming with agents + worktrees + harnesses + tasks + skills + whatnot? Most workflows I see people adopt involve large amounts of infrastructural fluff only to (more) quickly generate what I (anecdotally) have seen is somewhere between code generation of boilerplatish React/laravel/your-fav-framework components for web or native, and niche toy apps for mostly personal use. My very limited usage of agents has been for scanning large (bloated) codebases to get rid of unused code, meaning time consuming and tedious tasks. But it seems the general trend is that programmers just want faster horses?
sowbug 36 minutes ago [-]
You could zoom out a bit and rephrase the question.

Your great-aunt Ida died and left you a consulting team of ten pretty good software engineers. The team's contracts all just ended, so starting tomorrow they'll be idle. Ida said you must run the business for at least two years (fortunately, overhead is already paid for), or forfeit your share of the inheritance. After that you can keep going or liquidate it.

What do you do?

sam0x17 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah perfect example, the main thing I _would_ use multiple agents on is optimizing/benchmarking code, but for that you specifically can't use worktree, you need one agent per machine or they'll taint each other's benchmarks
throwaw12 3 hours ago [-]
This looks impressive!

How do you restore the state from the old workspaces? do you spawn tmux and resume the conversation or do you do it differently? from the video it felt like instant

tordrt 3 hours ago [-]
The underlying git worktree still lives on your disk until you delete it. So its not harder than starting a terminal with claude --continue, or codex resume --last inside the git worktree, depending on what agent the user used.
Renaud 3 hours ago [-]
Nice tool for working multiple sessions without them tripping over each-other.

I appreciate that you provided multiple OS versions rather than just go for Mac only like some.

tordrt 3 hours ago [-]
I have tried to provide after best ability, but have only been testing them on vm's on my mac! So be aware. I labeled them Beta due to this. But most features should work fine, probably better on linux than windows.
twostorytower 3 hours ago [-]
Congrats on your launch! How is this different than Conductor?
tordrt 3 hours ago [-]
The main difference is that Baton is agent-agnostic and terminal-native. It doesn't add a GUI on top of Claude Code or Codex, it builds around the terminal itself, so you run whatever agent CLI you want natively, but with convenient shortcuts for launching them. Which is a nicer experience in my view, but people have different views on this.

Baton is also more git-aware. Instead of just showing raw diff line counts, you see commits ahead and behind your target branch, so you can tell at a glance how far each workspace has diverged and shortcuts for resolving it in the matter you want.

One thing I think is unique is the built-in MCP server. It lets agents spawn new workspaces programmatically, so you use an agent to launch agents in new isolated workspaces.

giwook 3 hours ago [-]
Would be curious if it is more polished than Conductor. Memory leaks and random bugs seem to crop up in Conductor far too often.
FrankRay78 3 hours ago [-]
If nothing else, I see that Conductor is currently Mac only.
uzairnaeem 1 hours ago [-]
It's quite impressive
flippyhead 2 hours ago [-]
This looks great. How do you compare to cmux?
zephyrwhimsy 3 hours ago [-]
I have seen teams spend months fine-tuning retrieval algorithms when the real issue was that their ingestion pipeline was feeding HTML boilerplate into the vector store. Fix the input first.
toastal 3 hours ago [-]
> Features

It’s blank. Lots of blank gray rectangles too. Site is broken?

ninininino 2 hours ago [-]
Are agents at worktree level or can a single agent and chat work on a parent directory above multiple worktrees of different repos?
tordrt 2 hours ago [-]
You can open a directory also as a workspace, it just wont have git stats and git shortcuts.
ismail 2 hours ago [-]
I have not done much multi-agent development. Trying to understand what problem this solves, surely one can spin up multiple terminal tabs?
saberience 3 hours ago [-]
Nice work! Congrats on the release, did you check out Vibe-Kanban or Emdash which are both building in this space?

https://www.emdash.sh/

https://vibekanban.com/

What is your secret sauce, so to speak? I personally built my own local tools and system for this, I tried vibekanban but didn't feel like it added much to my productivity, haven't tried emdash yet.

drewfis 3 hours ago [-]
Go away, I'm baitin'!
lucasay 1 hours ago [-]
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JimSanchez 1 hours ago [-]
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builderhq_io 2 hours ago [-]
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zephyrwhimsy 3 hours ago [-]
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