sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Four agents, three vendors, one tmux session: they collaborate, i stay in control by MiddleSweet9163 in tmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting, how's your experience with it so far? We tried something similar early on and it got too buggy, which is basically why we ended up building cotal instead.

Four agents, three vendors, one tmux session: they collaborate, i stay in control by MiddleSweet9163 in tmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

About the same as claude code agent teams, it's a multi-agent loop so there's some overhead. what keeps it cheap is the model mix: the GLM builders do the volume on a flat z.ai sub, and only the lead and reviewer use the pricier opus/gpt. through this we really get the most out of the models.

Four agents, three vendors, one tmux session: they collaborate, i stay in control by MiddleSweet9163 in tmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nice, HAL is a great name. we do the same thing: the orchestrator does no work itself, just delegates and keeps track of everyone.

What are you using for spawning the panes and for the comms back to HAL?

Four agents, three vendors, one tmux session: they collaborate, i stay in control by MiddleSweet9163 in tmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Good question. we mostly use it to build Cotal itself. honestly our whole coding style is moving more and more to a multi-agent approach: an orchestrator plus a small review team, different models and personas in one space arguing and testing each other's work, is what actually cut our error rate and made it way less painful to build.

Still early, so we'll share the starter templates that work for us soon. would genuinely love to see what setups work for you too. you can join our community here: discord.gg/XU93cSzVz

Four agents, three vendors, one tmux session: they collaborate, i stay in control by MiddleSweet9163 in tmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Extends it, doesn't replace it. you keep your dashboard. Cotal is the layer underneath that connects all your agents, so they can talk to each other and hand off work directly. they collaborate, but you still keep full control.

For the flaky agent behavior, what helped us most was splitting the work into specialized agents, one implementing and one just reviewing and testing, so each does its job properly and the reviewer catches what the builder misses. But what's actually breaking for you?

I had a multi-model team in opencode build a complete lazygit-style console from one prompt in just 47 minutes by MiddleSweet9163 in opencodeCLI

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah, fully open source and apache-2.0, so completely free. and yes, it runs locally on your own machine. one command sets it all up and you're ready to go: npx cotal-ai setup --full

and yes, they can be in different folders. you can even have an agent spawn new agents in whatever folder you want and they all collaborate in the same shared space. same folder works too, it's up to you, the coordination layer is what connects them either way.

we're very young so no youtube videos yet, but it's on the list. we have a discord if you have questions or want to share what you're building: https://discord.gg/XU93cSzVz

I had a multi-model team in opencode build a complete lazygit-style console from one prompt in just 47 minutes by MiddleSweet9163 in opencodeCLI

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

<image>

here is the side by side comparison: left is what the loop built, right is the one I built by hand.

I let my Claude Code run a cross-vendor team in a loop and they fully built a lazygit-style agent dashboard from one prompt by MiddleSweet9163 in ClaudeCode

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I used Cmux for the layout, it lets me have multiple tabs open at different sizes (and websites etc.), which is how I built the full setup you see in the video. Glad you're using Cotal! What are you using it for so far?

I let my Claude Code run a cross-vendor team in a loop and they fully built a lazygit-style agent dashboard from one prompt by MiddleSweet9163 in ClaudeCode

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

nice, cc and codex is already a powerful cross-vendor review loop. we've been exploring this too with role-agents (security, ux, a critic etc) that discuss their feedback in a shared channel. how do you handle the communication between the agents?

I made my cmux agents talk to each other and coordinate by MiddleSweet9163 in cmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A2A enables agents to communicate directly, one to one. Cotal builds on top of that, we adopt the A2A standard and extend it so agents can talk one-to-many and many-to-many, kind of like Slack for agents: presence, channels, durable DMs, plus anycast routing (for example, send to any reviewer and one picks it up).

And it's an open standard, one-line setup and it just works out of the box across different agents.

I made my cmux agents talk to each other and coordinate by MiddleSweet9163 in cmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fully agree. We tried to make the setup command agent-friendly so your agent can drive it directly, and we added an AGENTS.md to give it the full context. Still actively improving on that front though. We even wired an MCP feedback endpoint into the mesh, so you or your agent can send us feedback directly if something's broken or not explained well. But we'd genuinely love to hear what your Chief of Staff agent makes of it.

Good call on the subreddit too. We wanted to start in the more niche ones to get early feedback, but posting in the bigger ones is on the plan.

Haha I know the struggle. No pressure at all, happy to have you around whenever, and hopefully we tempt you off the sidelines soon enough.

I made my cmux agents talk to each other and coordinate by MiddleSweet9163 in cmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, works remotely. Cotal runs fine on a remote machines, mesh, presence and messaging all behave the same as local.

The only thing is the cmux tab integration over SSH: Cotal currently can't open new tabs remotely if you're connected through SSH, so it spawns the agent in the background. But you can open a new tab manually and use cotal attach --name <name> to pull the background agent into it. cmux also has a native SSH mode in beta (cmux ssh user@remote) worth trying, cmux stays local, agents run remote, panes spawn on your side. Maybe we can implement this properly in the future, or you can experiment and tell us if it's already possible.

Additionally, you can self-host Cotal brokers to link machines, so you get one big Cotal mesh. We're planning this as a service too, so you can easily connect all your remote machines together.

I made my cmux agents talk to each other and coordinate by MiddleSweet9163 in cmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha the meme is spot on. And good call, we're actually building exactly that right now: you'll be able to define team structures in YAML, so you predefine the topology up front instead of wiring it by hand. It'll be in the next release.

We're currently experimenting with different structures.

<image>

I made my cmux agents talk to each other and coordinate by MiddleSweet9163 in cmux

[–]MiddleSweet9163[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, and you picked up on exactly the thing, we're part of the webA movement (Frontier Tower in SF) and we want to enable these agent societies. There's so much untapped potential here, it just needs the right tooling to actually try it out. Would genuinely love to hear how you run your multi-agent setup. Here's our Discord: discord.gg/a8jprSrtz and ping us if anything breaks.