The real bottleneck isn’t human review per se, it’s unstructured review. Parallel agents only make sense if each worktree has a tight contract: scoped task, invariant tests, and a diff small enough to audit quickly. Without that, you’re just converting “typing time” into “reading time,” which is usually worse. Tools like this shine when paired with discipline: one hypothesis per agent, automated checks gate merges, and humans arbitrate intent—not correctness.
Agreed. I generally see much better results for smaller, well-scoped tasks. Since there's very little friction to spinning up a worktree (~2s), I open one for any small tasks, something I couldn't do while working on a single branch.
There is something you are not explaining (at least I couldn't find it, sorry if you do), but how do you manage apps states? Basically databases?
Most of these agents solutions are focusing on git branches and worktrees, but at least none of them mention databases. How do you handle them? For example, in my projects, this means I would need ten different copies of my database. What about other microservices that are used, like redis, celery, etc? Are you duplicating (10-plicating) all of them?
If this works flawlessly it would be very powerful, but I think it still needs to solve more issues whan just filesystem conflicts.
Why aren’t you mocking your dependencies? I should be able to run a microservice without 3rd party and it still work. If it doesn’t, it’s a distributed monolith.
For databases, if you can’t see a connection string in env vars, use sqlite://:memory and make a test db like you do for unit testing.
For redis, provide a mock impl that gets/sets keys in a hash table or dictionary.
What higher fidelity do you get with a real postgres over a SQLite in memory or even pglite or whatever.
The point isn’t you shouldn’t have a database, the point is what are your concerns? For me and my teams, we care about our code, the performance of that code, the correctness of that code, and don’t test against a live database so that we understand the separation of concerns between our app and its storage. We expect a database to be there. We expect it to have such and such schema. We don’t expect it to live at a certain address or a certain configuration as that is the databases concern.
We tell our app at startup where that address is or we don’t. The app should only care whether we did or not, if not, it will need to make one to work.
This is the same logic with unit testing. If you’re unit testing against a real database, that isn’t unit testing, that’s an integration test.
If you do care about the speed of your database and how your app scales, you aren’t going to be doing that on your local machine.
There is your idealization, and there is reality. Mocks are to be avoided. I reserve them for external dependencies.
> What higher fidelity do you get with a real postgres over a SQLite in memory or even pglite or whatever
You want them to have the same syntax and features, to the extent that you use them, or you'll have one code path for testing and another for production. For example, sqlite does not support ARRAYs or UUIDs natively, so you'll have to write a separate implementation. This is a vector for bugs.
You're right that sqlite doesn't support array's or uuid's natively. SQLite was only a suggestion on how one might go about separating your database engine concerns with your data layer concerns.
If you fail to understand why this separation is important, you'll fail to reason with why you'd do it in the first place so continue building apps like it's 1999, tightly coupled and you need the whole stack to run your thing. God forbid you expand beyond just 1 team.
Great question currently superset manages worktrees + runs setup/teardown scripts you define on project setup. Those scripts can install dependencies, transfer env variables, and spin up branching services.
For example:
• if you’re using Neon/Supabase, your setup script can create a DB branch per workspace
• if you’re using Docker, the script can launch isolated containers for Redis/Postgres/Celery/etc
Currently we only orchestrate when they run, and have the user define what they do for each project, because every stack is different. This is a point of friction we are also solving by adding some features to help users automatically generate setup/teardown scripts that work for their projects.
We are also building cloud workspaces that will hopefully solve this issue for you and not limit users by their local hardware.
Just docker compose and spin up 10
stacks? Should not be too much for modern laptop. But it would be great if tool like this could manage the ports (allocate unique set for each worktree, add those to .env)
For some cases test-containers [1] is an option as well. I’m using them for integration tests that need Postgres.
You can for PG use that magic copy db they have, where they instantly (close to) copy db and with git-worktrees you can work on this, then tear it down. With sqlite obviously you would just copy it
Hey there, I'm another member of the superset team! I think it's definitely something you have to get used to, and it is somewhat task dependent.
For bug fixes and quick changes I can definitely get to 5-7 in parallel, but for real work I can only do 2-3 agents in parallel.
Human review still remains the /eventual/ bottleneck, but I find even when I'm in the "review phase" of a PR, I have enough downtime to get another agent the context it needs between agent turns.
We're looking into ways to reduce the amount of human interaction next, I think there's a lot of cool ideas in that space but the goal is over time tools improve to require less and less human intervention.
Use review bots (CodeRabbit, Sourcery and Codescene together work for me). This is for my own projects outside of work, of course. I use Terragon for this. 10 parallel rust builds would kill my computer. Got a threadripper on its way through, so superset sounds like something I need to give a go.
Recently I gave Catnip a try and it works very smoothly. It works on web via GitHub workspaces and also has mobile app.
https://github.com/wandb/catnip
Thanks, Catnip looks pretty cool! Honestly it's pretty similar, I think ours is a bit more lightweight (it seems they have remote sandboxes where they host their code whereas we host your code locally using git worktrees).
The mobile app is a pretty cool feature though - will definitely take a peek at that soon.
After setting up catnip it seems pretty sweet. The major difference is they are running as a cloud sandbox and we are currently running as a local terminal. Say you don’t want to use any worktrees or do stuff in parallel superset still works as a classic terminal. Eventually we plan on adding cloud workspaces like catnip tho
LOL yeah I agree, we're definitely building in a crowded space. I am very hopeful though for the amount of utility that'll be made in the agent orchestration space though! There's a lot that can be built if we successfully make developers 10x more productive.
LOL it definitely can get a little trippy but it's pretty doable! I can't get to 10 regularly but the space is moving in that direction (more agents in parallel hopefully equals more work done).
I liked this video a lot for a general idea of how it's possible, the main thing we need for 10 agents at once to be possible is less of a need for human intervention for agents, but I think it'll happen sooner (it may even be possible now with the right tools) than later.
I’ve been following this space and a lot of good apps:
Conductor
Chorus
Vibetunnel
VibeKanban
Mux
Happy
AutoClaude
ClaudeSquad
All of these allow you to work on multiple terminals at once. Some support work trees and others don’t. Some work on your phone and others are desktop only.
My issue with most of them is the xterm.js, which can't handle when the terminals get large/too big, Even Conductor (great app, i love conductor and the team behind it) had to drop their "big-terminal" mode. i'm hacking a native solution for this which i personally like by hacking Ghostty+SwiftTerm.
I’ve been a career programmer for almost two decades but have stopped for a while to parent my young kids. Is this what I’m coming back to? Because honestly I hate it.
I have my own VM's with agents installed inside, is there a tool which supports calling a codex/claude in a particular directory through a particular SSH destination?
Basically BringYourOwnAgentAndSandbox support.
Or which supports plugins so I can give it a small script which hooks it up to my available agents.
We have the BringYourOwnAgent part! For sandboxes we may try to use just one provider if I had to guess as I'm not sure what the effort would look like to support a bunch of them, which provider do you use for your VM's?
Hmm probably out of scope unfortunately as it's a pretty high maintenance burden to support (hg share is not 1:1 with git worktrees), it's possible our sandbox offering may work out-of-box for hg as we'll probably just clone your repo -> an ai agent will take it from there! We'll have to see but no promises
Noticed this is built with electron (nice job with the project architecture btw, I appreciate the cleanness), any particular reason a Windows build isn't available yet?
We do plan to ship Windows (and Linux) builds, Electron makes that feasible, but for the first few releases we focused on macOS so we could keep the surface area small and make sure the core experience was solid since none of us are using Windows or Linux machines to properly test the app in those environments.
But it on the roadmap and glad to know theres interest there :)
In the past I've worked with devs who complain about the cost of context switching when they're asked to work on more than one thing in a sprint. I have no idea how they'd cope with a tool like this. They'd probably complain a lot and just not bother using it.
Thanks for the question. For most traditional web apps using frameworks like Next.js, Vite, etc they'll automatically try the next port if its in use (3000-> 3001 -> 3003). We give a visualization of which ports are running from each worktree so you can see at a glance whats where.
For more complex setups if your app has hardcoded ports or multiple services that need coordination you can use setup/teardown scripts to manage this. Either dynamically assigning ports or killing the previous server before starting a new one (you can also kill the previous sever manually).
In practice most users aren't running all 10 agent's dev servers at once (yet), you're usually actively previewing 1-2 at at time while the other are working (writing code, running tests, reviewing, etc). But please give it a try and let me know if you encounter anything you want us to improve :)
I've played with git worktrees a few years back but until agents it was never that practical to have more than 2 worktrees at once. Now that it is practical, solving the poor usability makes sense for us.
Appreciate your input but I don't understand what you mean here.
You had use cases before in which you wanted more than 2 worktrees at once in the past and needed to juggle between them at the speed of "practical"?
What were you doing back then (a few years back and before agents as you implied) that required this and that your solution now solves?
What poor usability are you referring to here? Is the rate of utilizing git-worktrees a metric you are measuring? That does not make sense to me.
I also watched the demo video, and I don't understand the value here. Perhaps I am not your target demographic, but I am trying to understand who is. Is this for vibe-coding side projects only? Would be nice if you had a more practical/real stakes example. The demo video did not land for me.
Hmm I guess two good questions to check to see if this tool is useful for you is 1) do you use a cli coding agent for the vast majority of your work and 2) are you interested in using more than one at once? If those two assumptions are true, I think our UI is a nice way to make the git worktree workflow (a very common path to running multiple agents) a bit easier to manage! It handles copying over environment variables for you, setting up containers, and a lot of the other small things you need to think about when using git worktrees basically.
Having a more practical video is a great call-out though, we should probably have a more deep dive video of an actual session!
The real bottleneck isn’t human review per se, it’s unstructured review. Parallel agents only make sense if each worktree has a tight contract: scoped task, invariant tests, and a diff small enough to audit quickly. Without that, you’re just converting “typing time” into “reading time,” which is usually worse. Tools like this shine when paired with discipline: one hypothesis per agent, automated checks gate merges, and humans arbitrate intent—not correctness.
Agreed. I generally see much better results for smaller, well-scoped tasks. Since there's very little friction to spinning up a worktree (~2s), I open one for any small tasks, something I couldn't do while working on a single branch.
There is something you are not explaining (at least I couldn't find it, sorry if you do), but how do you manage apps states? Basically databases?
Most of these agents solutions are focusing on git branches and worktrees, but at least none of them mention databases. How do you handle them? For example, in my projects, this means I would need ten different copies of my database. What about other microservices that are used, like redis, celery, etc? Are you duplicating (10-plicating) all of them?
If this works flawlessly it would be very powerful, but I think it still needs to solve more issues whan just filesystem conflicts.
Why aren’t you mocking your dependencies? I should be able to run a microservice without 3rd party and it still work. If it doesn’t, it’s a distributed monolith.
For databases, if you can’t see a connection string in env vars, use sqlite://:memory and make a test db like you do for unit testing.
For redis, provide a mock impl that gets/sets keys in a hash table or dictionary.
Stop bringing your whole house to the camp site.
Because the real thing is higher fidelity, but it can expensive to boot up many times.
Higher fidelity?
What does that mean in this context?
What higher fidelity do you get with a real postgres over a SQLite in memory or even pglite or whatever.
The point isn’t you shouldn’t have a database, the point is what are your concerns? For me and my teams, we care about our code, the performance of that code, the correctness of that code, and don’t test against a live database so that we understand the separation of concerns between our app and its storage. We expect a database to be there. We expect it to have such and such schema. We don’t expect it to live at a certain address or a certain configuration as that is the databases concern.
We tell our app at startup where that address is or we don’t. The app should only care whether we did or not, if not, it will need to make one to work.
This is the same logic with unit testing. If you’re unit testing against a real database, that isn’t unit testing, that’s an integration test.
If you do care about the speed of your database and how your app scales, you aren’t going to be doing that on your local machine.
There is your idealization, and there is reality. Mocks are to be avoided. I reserve them for external dependencies.
> What higher fidelity do you get with a real postgres over a SQLite in memory or even pglite or whatever
You want them to have the same syntax and features, to the extent that you use them, or you'll have one code path for testing and another for production. For example, sqlite does not support ARRAYs or UUIDs natively, so you'll have to write a separate implementation. This is a vector for bugs.
You're right that sqlite doesn't support array's or uuid's natively. SQLite was only a suggestion on how one might go about separating your database engine concerns with your data layer concerns.
If you fail to understand why this separation is important, you'll fail to reason with why you'd do it in the first place so continue building apps like it's 1999, tightly coupled and you need the whole stack to run your thing. God forbid you expand beyond just 1 team.
pglite might be an option.
Great question currently superset manages worktrees + runs setup/teardown scripts you define on project setup. Those scripts can install dependencies, transfer env variables, and spin up branching services.
For example: • if you’re using Neon/Supabase, your setup script can create a DB branch per workspace • if you’re using Docker, the script can launch isolated containers for Redis/Postgres/Celery/etc
Currently we only orchestrate when they run, and have the user define what they do for each project, because every stack is different. This is a point of friction we are also solving by adding some features to help users automatically generate setup/teardown scripts that work for their projects.
We are also building cloud workspaces that will hopefully solve this issue for you and not limit users by their local hardware.
Just docker compose and spin up 10 stacks? Should not be too much for modern laptop. But it would be great if tool like this could manage the ports (allocate unique set for each worktree, add those to .env)
For some cases test-containers [1] is an option as well. I’m using them for integration tests that need Postgres.
[1] https://testcontainers.com/
That’s what our setup/teardown scripts are for but we plan on making the generation of them automatic
You can for PG use that magic copy db they have, where they instantly (close to) copy db and with git-worktrees you can work on this, then tear it down. With sqlite obviously you would just copy it
How are people productive using 10 parallel agents? Doesn’t human review time become a bottleneck?
Hey there, I'm another member of the superset team! I think it's definitely something you have to get used to, and it is somewhat task dependent.
For bug fixes and quick changes I can definitely get to 5-7 in parallel, but for real work I can only do 2-3 agents in parallel.
Human review still remains the /eventual/ bottleneck, but I find even when I'm in the "review phase" of a PR, I have enough downtime to get another agent the context it needs between agent turns.
We're looking into ways to reduce the amount of human interaction next, I think there's a lot of cool ideas in that space but the goal is over time tools improve to require less and less human intervention.
Use review bots (CodeRabbit, Sourcery and Codescene together work for me). This is for my own projects outside of work, of course. I use Terragon for this. 10 parallel rust builds would kill my computer. Got a threadripper on its way through, so superset sounds like something I need to give a go.
Yeah we're looking into ways to give users access to these tools in Superset too!
And yeah the next frontier is definitely offloading to agents in sandboxes, Kiet has that as one of his top priorities.
Running into this issue with just 1 agent. I have plenty of tokens to spare. Just not enough time to iterate and bugfix.
Congrats on the launch!
Recently I gave Catnip a try and it works very smoothly. It works on web via GitHub workspaces and also has mobile app. https://github.com/wandb/catnip
How is this different?
Thanks, Catnip looks pretty cool! Honestly it's pretty similar, I think ours is a bit more lightweight (it seems they have remote sandboxes where they host their code whereas we host your code locally using git worktrees).
The mobile app is a pretty cool feature though - will definitely take a peek at that soon.
havent tried it yet, but i just signed up so ill get back to you on that :)
After setting up catnip it seems pretty sweet. The major difference is they are running as a cloud sandbox and we are currently running as a local terminal. Say you don’t want to use any worktrees or do stuff in parallel superset still works as a classic terminal. Eventually we plan on adding cloud workspaces like catnip tho
Agent orchestration CLI tools are the new Javascript frameworks
LOL yeah I agree, we're definitely building in a crowded space. I am very hopeful though for the amount of utility that'll be made in the agent orchestration space though! There's a lot that can be built if we successfully make developers 10x more productive.
The incentives here, though, are much stronger. If I make it just as easy for my customers to use 10X tokens as 1X token, the world is my oyster.
IDK what everyone is doing anymore. Just why do you need 10 parallel agents doing things. How is this even a possible workflow for a person.
LOL it definitely can get a little trippy but it's pretty doable! I can't get to 10 regularly but the space is moving in that direction (more agents in parallel hopefully equals more work done).
I liked this video a lot for a general idea of how it's possible, the main thing we need for 10 agents at once to be possible is less of a need for human intervention for agents, but I think it'll happen sooner (it may even be possible now with the right tools) than later.
https://youtu.be/o-pMCoVPN_k?si=cCBqufdg3nWcJDHD
Ask a Manager.
I’ve been following this space and a lot of good apps:
Conductor
Chorus
Vibetunnel
VibeKanban
Mux
Happy
AutoClaude
ClaudeSquad
All of these allow you to work on multiple terminals at once. Some support work trees and others don’t. Some work on your phone and others are desktop only.
Superset seems like a great addition!
My issue with most of them is the xterm.js, which can't handle when the terminals get large/too big, Even Conductor (great app, i love conductor and the team behind it) had to drop their "big-terminal" mode. i'm hacking a native solution for this which i personally like by hacking Ghostty+SwiftTerm.
Same my friend, I'm building a custom frontend for Vibetunnel that uses ghostty-web[0] instead of xterm!
0. https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web
ghostty-web looks interesting. full xterm compatibility as well. will give it a try!
Interesting, I'd love to hear more about this! Were you/they experiencing performance bottlenecks with xterm?
Thanks we're totally open source too! so you can check us out on github too https://github.com/superset-sh/superset
Catnip: https://github.com/wandb/catnip
Do any of these work with hg?
I’ve been a career programmer for almost two decades but have stopped for a while to parent my young kids. Is this what I’m coming back to? Because honestly I hate it.
is there such a tool, which is composable?
I have my own VM's with agents installed inside, is there a tool which supports calling a codex/claude in a particular directory through a particular SSH destination?
Basically BringYourOwnAgentAndSandbox support.
Or which supports plugins so I can give it a small script which hooks it up to my available agents.
We have the BringYourOwnAgent part! For sandboxes we may try to use just one provider if I had to guess as I'm not sure what the effort would look like to support a bunch of them, which provider do you use for your VM's?
we are working on that, but its not there just yet
What if my job uses hg and not git?
Hmm probably out of scope unfortunately as it's a pretty high maintenance burden to support (hg share is not 1:1 with git worktrees), it's possible our sandbox offering may work out-of-box for hg as we'll probably just clone your repo -> an ai agent will take it from there! We'll have to see but no promises
Noticed this is built with electron (nice job with the project architecture btw, I appreciate the cleanness), any particular reason a Windows build isn't available yet?
We do plan to ship Windows (and Linux) builds, Electron makes that feasible, but for the first few releases we focused on macOS so we could keep the surface area small and make sure the core experience was solid since none of us are using Windows or Linux machines to properly test the app in those environments.
But it on the roadmap and glad to know theres interest there :)
Glad to help with the Windows build if you’re open to it!
Thanks for the offer! We'd be open to chatting, want to ping us on our discord?
In the past I've worked with devs who complain about the cost of context switching when they're asked to work on more than one thing in a sprint. I have no idea how they'd cope with a tool like this. They'd probably complain a lot and just not bother using it.
But then you got you merge and PR it. Just have the agents work in the same directory at the same time and have them commit only their changes.
I have a question: How do you manage web servers running parallely for 10 coding agents?
Thanks for the question. For most traditional web apps using frameworks like Next.js, Vite, etc they'll automatically try the next port if its in use (3000-> 3001 -> 3003). We give a visualization of which ports are running from each worktree so you can see at a glance whats where.
For more complex setups if your app has hardcoded ports or multiple services that need coordination you can use setup/teardown scripts to manage this. Either dynamically assigning ports or killing the previous server before starting a new one (you can also kill the previous sever manually).
In practice most users aren't running all 10 agent's dev servers at once (yet), you're usually actively previewing 1-2 at at time while the other are working (writing code, running tests, reviewing, etc). But please give it a try and let me know if you encounter anything you want us to improve :)
Run them on different ports?
Yep, for now that's how we do it! We're looking into remote sandboxes and tunneling soon though :)
I’ve used superset at work this last week, and it’s great! Excited to see what’s next!
Thanks, glad to hear it! Let us know if you have any feedback :)
Thanks! love to hear it :)
Not to be confused with Apache Superset (data visualization solution)
https://superset.apache.org/
correct :)
I wonder what will be the next git feature we are going to (re)discover and build dozens of shiny glorified user interfaces on top.
I've played with git worktrees a few years back but until agents it was never that practical to have more than 2 worktrees at once. Now that it is practical, solving the poor usability makes sense for us.
Appreciate your input but I don't understand what you mean here.
You had use cases before in which you wanted more than 2 worktrees at once in the past and needed to juggle between them at the speed of "practical"?
What were you doing back then (a few years back and before agents as you implied) that required this and that your solution now solves?
What poor usability are you referring to here? Is the rate of utilizing git-worktrees a metric you are measuring? That does not make sense to me.
I also watched the demo video, and I don't understand the value here. Perhaps I am not your target demographic, but I am trying to understand who is. Is this for vibe-coding side projects only? Would be nice if you had a more practical/real stakes example. The demo video did not land for me.
Hmm I guess two good questions to check to see if this tool is useful for you is 1) do you use a cli coding agent for the vast majority of your work and 2) are you interested in using more than one at once? If those two assumptions are true, I think our UI is a nice way to make the git worktree workflow (a very common path to running multiple agents) a bit easier to manage! It handles copying over environment variables for you, setting up containers, and a lot of the other small things you need to think about when using git worktrees basically.
Having a more practical video is a great call-out though, we should probably have a more deep dive video of an actual session!