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Show HN: Superset – Terminal to run 10 parallel coding agents (superset.sh)

96 points by avipeltz ↗ HN
Hey HN, we’re Avi, Kiet, and Satya. We’re building Superset, an open-source terminal made for managing a bunch of coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc) in parallel.

- Superset makes it easy to spin up git worktrees and automatically setup your environment

- Agents and terminal tabs are isolated to worktrees, preventing conflicts

- Built-in hooks [0] to notify when your coding agents are done/needs attention,

- A diff viewer to review the changes and make PRs quickly

We’re three engineers who’ve built and maintained large codebases, and kept wanting to work on as many features in parallel as possible. Git worktrees [1] have been a useful solution for this task but they’re annoying to spin up and manage. We started superset as a tool that uses the best practices we’ve discovered running parallel agents.

Here is a demo video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHJhKFX2S-4

We all use Superset to build Superset, and it more than doubles our productivity (you’ll be able to tell from the autoupdates). We have many friends using it over their IDE of choice or replacing their terminals with Superset, and it seems to stick because they can keep using whatever CLI agent or tool they want while Superset just augments their existing set of tools.

Superset is written predominantly in Typescript and based on Electron, xterm.js, and node-pty. We chose xterm+node-pty because it's a proven way to run real PTYs in a desktop app (used by VSCode and Hyper), and Electron lets us ship fast. Next, we’re exploring features like running worktrees in cloud VMs to offload local resources, context sharing between agents, and a top-level orchestration agent for managing many worktrees or projects at once.

We’ve learned a lot building this: making a good terminal is more complex than you’d think, and terminal and git defaults aren’t universal (svn vs git, weird shell setups, complex monorepos, etc.).

Building a product for yourself is way faster and quite fun. It's early days, but we’d love you to try Superset across all your CLI tools and environments, we welcome your feedback! :)

[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

32 comments

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101008
There is something you are not explaining (at least I couldn't find it, sorry if you do), but how do you manage apps states? Basically databases?

Most of these agents solutions are focusing on git branches and worktrees, but at least none of them mention databases. How do you handle them? For example, in my projects, this means I would need ten different copies of my database. What about other microservices that are used, like redis, celery, etc? Are you duplicating (10-plicating) all of them?

If this works flawlessly it would be very powerful, but I think it still needs to solve more issues whan just filesystem conflicts.

nateb2022
Noticed this is built with electron (nice job with the project architecture btw, I appreciate the cleanness), any particular reason a Windows build isn't available yet?
thorum
How are people productive using 10 parallel agents? Doesn’t human review time become a bottleneck?
theturtletalks
I’ve been following this space and a lot of good apps:

Conductor

Chorus

Vibetunnel

VibeKanban

Mux

Happy

AutoClaude

ClaudeSquad

All of these allow you to work on multiple terminals at once. Some support work trees and others don’t. Some work on your phone and others are desktop only.

Superset seems like a great addition!

roggenbuck
I’ve used superset at work this last week, and it’s great! Excited to see what’s next!
bingemaker
I have a question: How do you manage web servers running parallely for 10 coding agents?
amortka
The real bottleneck isn’t human review per se, it’s unstructured review. Parallel agents only make sense if each worktree has a tight contract: scoped task, invariant tests, and a diff small enough to audit quickly. Without that, you’re just converting “typing time” into “reading time,” which is usually worse. Tools like this shine when paired with discipline: one hypothesis per agent, automated checks gate merges, and humans arbitrate intent—not correctness.
xmonkee
IDK what everyone is doing anymore. Just why do you need 10 parallel agents doing things. How is this even a possible workflow for a person.
kaffekaka
I am thinking the same. Is the bottleneck for many people just how many different tasks they can press through a certain window of time?

I feel that maybe a couple of things in parallel could be useful at certain times, but more often the need is not for "one more jira ticket in the pipeline" but rather things like meetings, discussing strategy, clarifying things so they can be built at all as opposed to actually having ten crystal clear tasks to unleash the bot army on.

onion2k
In the past I've worked with devs who complain about the cost of context switching when they're asked to work on more than one thing in a sprint. I have no idea how they'd cope with a tool like this. They'd probably complain a lot and just not bother using it.
scottydelta
Congrats on the launch!

Recently I gave Catnip a try and it works very smoothly. It works on web via GitHub workspaces and also has mobile app. https://github.com/wandb/catnip

How is this different?

agentifysh
Agent orchestration CLI tools are the new Javascript frameworks
hmokiguess
I wonder what will be the next git feature we are going to (re)discover and build dozens of shiny glorified user interfaces on top.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
memoriuaysj
is there such a tool, which is composable?

I have my own VM's with agents installed inside, is there a tool which supports calling a codex/claude in a particular directory through a particular SSH destination?

Basically BringYourOwnAgentAndSandbox support.

Or which supports plugins so I can give it a small script which hooks it up to my available agents.

scottydelta
Check out Catnip, fully based on GitHub workspaces and uses your own Claude subscription.

Since it’s open source and based on GitHub workspaces, it’s free and works very smoothly.

kridsdale1
What if my job uses hg and not git?
kimos
I’ve been a career programmer for almost two decades but have stopped for a while to parent my young kids. Is this what I’m coming back to? Because honestly I hate it.
kaffekaka
Agree.

This kind of workflow feels a lot like "making the horse ten times faster", instead of using the power of AI to make developers stronger to build things that were previously too difficult or not worth the effort.

I guess I don't really see the intersection of "simple enough for parallel agents" vs "valuable enough to be worth the parallelization overhead".

fragmede
But then you got you merge and PR it. Just have the agents work in the same directory at the same time and have them commit only their changes.
smoyer
Funny ... I have a 50-line bash script that does this but it also runs each agent in a sandbox so the agents can't write to disk outside their designated got worktree. I'm happy to skip the TS+NodeJS but will admit my version might not be as portable.
saddlepaddle
Yeah we have friends that have done the same! Definitely quick to build a custom CLI if you're willing to roll up your sleeves.

I do tend to like the niceties of our GUI tho, if you get a chance to compare your cli / our GUI would love to hear what you think!

maxdo
I can see lots of tools explode around CC, but majority still use Cursor, cursror supports multiple agents, branching, multimodels etc.

It is really hard to justify tools like these, where you need CC+this tool+ some other tools to make it more productive , and you need to deal with billing where cursor gives you access to all models possible + BYOK.

Not trying to be negative ... but why hustle?

saddlepaddle
No you're good, it's fair feedback! I think a fair description of where we're at is "if you use a cli agent for 90+% of your work, this is a drop-in terminal replacement that'll make it easier for you to run them in parallel". It definitely is dependent on you preferring a CLI agent like Claude Code, but for us since it's all we use the worktree management was a missing component!
sathish316
Nice work! You might also want to look at Vibe Kanban, which supports similar features across multiple projects and multiple coding CLIs - https://www.vibekanban.com/

Superset will be a good alternative for someone who is using only ClaudeCode or CLIs. But for someone using Cursor, How does this differ from Cursor’s Agents UI, which supports local background agents using Git worktrees?

saddlepaddle
YES their project is great, there's a lot in the planning space that would be extremely useful (grabbing your Circleback notes -> creating tickets, having playbooks like Devin in ticket form so you can choose what to build first, etc. etc.)

I'd need to do a refresher but for Cursor agents you can choose any model but you're tied to their tooling right? I've heard they're really solid I just find people have their cli preferences and being terminal-first let's anyone bring their favorite agent along for the ride

nickphx
ah so now you can be a "10x" engineer -- 10x the cost with 0 to show. Where do I sign up?
decadefade
I come here for an Apache Superset demo and I get this?! (I'm mostly kidding but man, what a name collision)
eigenvalue
I really think git worktrees are a bad approach. You’re better off in my view with one shared state and dealing with conflicts live by dividing tasks ahead of time using beads and letting agents communicate with each other using Agent Mail and file reservations.

I’ve been able to productively run 12+ agents from CC, Codex, Gemini-cli at the same time this way and it works really well.