Once I had six Claude Code sessions open at once, the most expensive part of my workflow was not writing code. It was patrol: cycling through tabs to see which agent was still running and which one had been sitting on a question for ten minutes. tmux has no concept of any of this. To tmux, every pane is a rectangle of terminal, equally interesting, equally mute. herdr’s pitch lands exactly on that pain: panes are still real terminals, but a sidebar shows each agent’s live state. So it got a one-month trial, with exit conditions written down before it started. The verdict lands on August 16, and this post is honest about still being inside the window.
After a month of overhauling my dotfiles with AI in the loop, the real value was not "the AI writes my configs". It was two much more boring properties: the research side keeps finding things I cannot see, and I verify every claim it makes before acting. Skip the first and you only ever fix problems you already knew about. Skip the second and a plausible-sounding wrong answer walks you into a ditch. The loop # claim fails verification
I kept slamming into my Claude subscription's usage limits, and the workload didn't feel heavy enough to explain it. The culprit was allocation, not volume: my main session ran on the most capable model available, and that model was also doing the grep runs, the batch edits, and the yes/no verification passes. Flagship reasoning, billed at flagship rates, spent on work a model a tenth the price does identically well. 馃И Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x 路 macOS Where the tokens actually go # Two things surprised me when I looked at my consumption honestly.
I run four or more Claude Code agents at once, and until recently they all shared one working tree. Two agents editing the same repo means one of them eventually builds against the other's half-finished changes. Git worktrees fix that cleanly. What nobody warned me about is that the fix multiplies a different problem I already had: forgetting which folder a session lives in. Taming Claude Code Sessions 路 Part 5 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 馃И Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x 路 macOS The symptom # With several agents in one directory, the working tree is shared mutable state. Agent A refactors a partial, agent B runs the build, and B’s “failure” is really A’s work in flight. I had been dodging this by scoping agents to different subdirectories, which works until it does not.
Once you're comfortable with AI coding agents, you start running several at once: one refactoring here, one writing tests there, one stuck waiting for your approval. Keeping them straight is its own little skill. Taming Claude Code Sessions 路 Part 4 of 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 馃И Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x 路 macOS / Linux Here are two ways to do it: a lightweight tmux plugin, and (briefly) dedicated “AI terminal” apps.