Launch HN: Superset (YC P26) – IDE for the agents era (github.com)
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDHn7gUwfg
Try it: https://superset.sh/
We’re three engineers who’ve built and maintained large codebases, and we kept wanting to work on more than one thing at a time. Once CLI coding agents got good enough we found ourselves running several of them in parallel: triaging Github issues, adding a few ui features, reviewing PRs, researching a refactor, etc.
The funny part was that we and a lot of our friends had all hacked together similar scripts around git worktrees. Worktrees are a nice primitive for this because each agent can get an isolated copy of the repo, but the workflows around them can feel pretty messy, setting up/tearing down environments and managing dev servers.
We first posted here a few months ago when Superset was mostly an open-source terminal for managing git worktrees (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368739). Since then, it has changed a lot based on feedback from people using it on real codebases, plus contributions from our open-source community. The product has grown into something closer to an IDE for managing agent work across many worktrees, repos, and machines.
The biggest thing we learned is that the hard part is not just “run more agents.” It is managing all the state around them: worktrees, ports, terminal sessions, environment setup, diffs, tasks, and PRs. Once you have five or ten agents running, the bottleneck often becomes remembering what each one is doing and actual human review. We added task / issue tracking so work can move from issue → agent → diff → PR → review without losing the context all in Superset. But there's a lot more work to improve this experience over time.
We also launched Remote Workspaces, currently in beta. The idea is that you can run coding agents on remote machines instead of using all the memory and CPU on your laptop, while still managing the work from the Superset desktop app.To support Remote workspaces, we isolated the core functionality of our Electron app into a headless Hono server such that it can be deployed into any workspaces and talk to any client (such as our desktop app, mobile, web, etc) and still provide the same interface that our desktop app has.
A lot of our next work is around making agent work easier to manage when you are not sitting at your main dev machine. We’re building more functionality into the Superset CLI, improving remote workspace flows, and working on Superset Mobile (coming soon) so you can check on agents, review progress, and steer work from your phone.
We’d love more feedback on Superset, especially if you are daily driving coding agents!
64 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 53.7 ms ] threadWhat happens if Cursor makes the exact same features as your product?
Question on Remote Workspace: Can the remote machine port forward so I can use a browser to see / test current state of the app on the remote machine?
https://superset.apache.org/
It is very different from current editors and the direction they are going in. In a way, it undermines the direction they are going. Current editors aim to make engineers 10x or 100x. These editors aim at a different target than the engineers. I will leave it to the imagination on who.
they all look incredibly / increasingly the same?
Could you share a comparison with the other tools out there?
GUIs slow you down, in my opinion. But having the nice visual diff is something we can't really do well in TUIs, so very welcome.
So, superset, for me (been using for quite some time now) is basically to organize my agent and terminal sessions per task and project.
I can switch context much easier and can also resume working on something days later, with all my tabs nicely available and separated.
This was consuming me before, a dozen or more tabs and windows in my computer that I don't really remember to which task each belongs to.
Kitty with oh-my-zsh, lazyvim and an agent. The entire thing is an ide. If I need to refactor, query data and interact with the system I just use native tools like rg+fastmod, bash, awk, jq... Either writing myself of asking an agent to do the heavy lifting.
Linux in the agent era is a breeze to operate and reason about, so the whole thing becomes a single development environment that's really light on resources and effective.
I installed Zellij on my server where most of work is happening and local machine and this works well for me. There are other issues I have now, but overall flow is fairly natural to what I am doing.
I liked that they did integrate a lot of agent workflow in Superset but my experience was that it would just take too many resources and especially with glitches, it wasn't worth it continuing. I had a period where i enjoyed working in it. It is vibe coded electron app, 2GB! is too much for this kind of app.
I just updated to their new version... it supposedly imported my projects but I can't find anything... so... I guess this is it.
https://github.com/apache/superset
Also - one issue I've seen with other tools doing worktree stuff is they don't deal with merge conflicts automatically. IMO the agents should just automatically resolve conflicts & rebase on their own, is that a thing here?
And on the worktree note, I find when working in a worktree the agent has a much easier time solving merge conflicts and as the number of feature branches scale and it just makes it so i dont have to worry about conflicts while working on a feature.
Can't wait to see what else you guys cook up!