Show HN: Baton – A desktop app for developing with AI agents (getbaton.dev)

by tordrt 52 comments 62 points
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52 comments

[−] mellosouls 44d 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 44d 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 44d 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 44d ago
I appreciate the feedback!
[−] riskable 44d 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 44d 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. :)

[−] ksidjwicjwif 44d ago
It’s so funny to me that every AI user feels the need to add this entire disclaimer about how it’s actually helping them build the Starship Enterprise from scratch or whatever every time someone even hints at it maybe being a little bit of a waste of money.
[−] michaelbuckbee 44d 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 44d ago
Like you make money with them?
[−] techgnosis 44d ago
This uses the CLIs so its using subscription pricing, not token pricing
[−] electrovir 44d ago
VC funding + spending more money on Claude instead of hiring more engineers
[−] tordrt 44d ago
200 dollars a month goes a long way with claude code
[−] jeffrwells 44d 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

[−] jFriedensreich 44d ago
Everyone is building the things that are just stop gaps: tui/terminal/cli as foundation for UI, worktree instead of jj workspaces. Rust, tauri or python. You all will discover that after the easy fun parts are done you are rebuilding an IDE and at that point why not try to make Vscode better.

- vscode can run as a webapp in a container no electron needed

- vscode supports workspaces, main arguments i hear is vscode assumes one project per window which is just not the case. i have a folder with all my projects/repos that is open as one workspace in vscode

- visualJJ is the best worktree/workspace manager that no one is talking about, i wish it was open source but there is currently no alternative i am aware of

Not many parts are missing to make this perfect for the use cases all the agent managers try to address, but unlike all these hacks this can evolve one extension at a time and i dont have to throw away all the things that my vscode setup has

[−] ale 44d 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 44d 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?

[−] KurSix 44d ago
People are just playing around with parallel agents because it looks cool on Twitter. In real prod, 90% of your time isn't spent typing lines of code, it's spent trying to figure out implicit business requirements and debugging undocumented legacy spaghetti. Agents sitting in isolated worktrees are completely useless here - they'll just rapidly and in parallel write code that completely fails to solve the actual business problem
[−] SkyPuncher 44d ago
You’re seeing that primarily because it’s what people can show off easily. Side projects they do for fun.

I use all of this stuff daily at work. Normally, I’m working on 2 to 4 features in parallel (so worktrees). This might not be simultaneously, but it’s at least across days or weeks.

Skills, agents, tasks, etc are really about creating repeatability in certain parts of my workflow without needing to be hands on.

[−] sausajez 44d 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.
[−] BrandiATMuhkuh 44d 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

[−] matrixreview 39d ago
Interesting approach to managing multiple agents. We built a GitHub App that does deterministic review of dependency graphs alongside doc review. It catches broken imports and security boundary crossings mathematically, not just opinion. Works well for reviewing agent-generated code.
[−] KurSix 44d ago
Spreading agents across git worktrees sounds awesome right up until the merge step. Sure, they're isolated on the filesystem, but when five parallel Claudes rewrite the exact same base class or interface for their own local needs, you're gonna end up with a merge conflict no neural net could ever untangle. All that saved time will just get burned manually rebasing this parallel chaos. Props for a cool pet project, but conceptually this is an architectural dead end
[−] causal 44d 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?
[−] rcarmo 44d ago
Nice. My take on this is https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw and https://github.com/rcarmo/webterm since I prefer to run my agents away from my desktop but still have a nice UX, but I have been thinking of packing them in electrobun.
[−] saberience 44d 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.

[−] twostorytower 44d ago
Congrats on your launch! How is this different than Conductor?
[−] ohnoesjmr 44d 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?

[−] electrovir 44d 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
[−] ericol 44d 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 44d 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

[−] ozgurds 42d ago
I think every developer have done running multiple Ai agents for one work. I even tried to make them talk over slack :)

I couldn't see the pricing page tho.

[−] throwaw12 44d 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

[−] Renaud 44d 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.

[−] PayToExist 44d ago
Looks like it could be extremely useful. I'm developing one thing at a time - small projects - but I'll keep this in mind for when things grow!
[−] ismail 44d ago
I have not done much multi-agent development. Trying to understand what problem this solves, surely one can spin up multiple terminal tabs?
[−] kylex-ken 44d ago
I have not dove into the particulars, i'm assuming the agents do push/pull requests on your repo so no versioning issues.
[−] ninininino 44d ago
Are agents at worktree level or can a single agent and chat work on a parent directory above multiple worktrees of different repos?
[−] toastal 44d ago

> Features

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

[−] iamsaitam 44d ago
Everyone's building the same thing nowadays ^^
[−] flippyhead 44d ago
This looks great. How do you compare to cmux?
[−] uzairnaeem 44d ago
It's quite impressive
[−] drewfis 44d ago
Go away, I'm baitin'!
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