A team of bots. Your machine.

When a bot delegates work, the subagent opens in a pane next to it, so you can watch every agent and step in when one needs you. That is the whole point of running this locally instead of in a hosted fleet: the work stays visible.

A router decides which harness (claude, codex, cursor-agent or pi) and which model takes each task. When one subscription hits its limit, the work moves to the next.

bot

A long-lived agent in its own herdr workspace, with its own instructions, memory and skills folders, optional cron schedules, and its own bot.toml.

subagent

A bot calls task; herdbot splits a pane to the right of the bot and runs the agent there. The run finishes with report_result, a harness turn-end hook, or a pane read, and the parent gets the result.

route

harness:model[:effort]. An explicit model wins, then the bot’s override, then the task class’s ordered list, then the default. The first available candidate takes the task.

failover

Quota or auth text in an agent’s pane writes a cooldown file, and routing skips that harness until the reset time plus a minute.

There is no orchestrator socket and no database. Every process reads and writes the same plain files under the herdbot home, and only the daemon prompts agents.

This is early, and it is macOS only for now — the daemon runs under launchd. Version 0.1.2, MIT licensed, installed as a Homebrew cask or from a release zip.

The source README’s list of what works, verified live on 2026-10-20:

• bots with their own workspace, instructions, memory and skills folders
• subagents in panes, with results delivered back to the bot that asked
• bot-to-bot messages, which wait until the receiving bot is idle
• cron schedules
• routing across claude, codex and pi, plus failover when a harness hits a quota or auth limit
• a one-way import of the Grok Bot roster
• rooms — group bots with channel, round-robin and moderated turn-taking
• computer use through cua

What is not there yet: importing Grok Bot’s schedules and skills, because they aren’t stored on disk. cursor-agent launches, but its tools haven’t been seen working end to end, which is why it is absent from the routing list above. The menu bar app ships in Herdbot.app and is still being polished.

This site adds no claim of its own. It is written from the project README at one revision; none of the product commands on the guide are executed here, and the guide says so.

Publishing this site does not turn a local, single-machine tool into a supported release. The README’s verification dates are the README’s, not this site’s.