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Show HN: Emdash – Open-source agentic development environment

79 points by onecommit

by mccoyb

2 subcomments

Here's my question:
if agents continue to get better with RL, what is future proof about this environment or UI?
I think we all know that managing 5-10 agents ... is not pretty. Are we really landing good PRs with 100% cognitive focus from 5-10 agents? Chances are, I'm making mistakes (and I assume other humans are too)? Why not 1 agent managing 5-10 agents for you? And so on?
Most of the development loop is in bash ... so as long as agents get better at using bash (amongst other things), what happens to this in 6 months?
I don't think this is operating at a higher-level of abstraction if agents themselves can coordinate agents across worktrees, etc.

by ttoinou

1 subcomments

So, what's your business model ? Is this an YC product, or a tool you developed while working on a YC product ?

by haimau

0 subcomment

Been driving my agents (CC, currently testing Pi) for a couple of weeks via Emdash. Finally, got a productive worktree setup working. There were still rough edges when I started, but the team has shipping fast [0] and is vaporizing concerns on the fly. Building on top of the native CLI seems to be the right strategy as well.
[0] https://github.com/generalaction/emdash/releases/

by snowhale

1 subcomments

the worktree pre-warming detail is interesting -- keeping a reserve pool and letting new tasks claim one instantly is the same pattern as connection pool pre-warming in databases. the underlying bottleneck is probably git having to traverse pack files and update the index when you run 'git worktree add'. one thing worth trying if you haven't: sparse checkout on the worktrees can cut that initialization time further, especially in large monorepos where most files are irrelevant to a given agent task.

by bketelsen

3 subcomments

this looks great, but can't test, the .deb package is broken with an issue about NODE_MODULE_VERSION mismatches. There seems to be a PR waiting for approval. Will keep an eye on it.

by FiloVenturini

1 subcomments

Have you considered adding any kind of agent coordination layer, e.g. letting one “orchestrator” agent spawn and direct sub-agents on specific subtasks, rather than having the developer manually assign each task? Or is the explicit human-in-the-loop assignment a deliberate design choice to keep control and avoid runaway costs?

by martinald

1 subcomments

Please codesign your Windows installer exes :)

by das-bikash-dev

2 subcomments

How does Emdash handle state management when running multiple agents on the same codebase? Particularly interested in how you prevent conflicts when agents are making concurrent modifications to dependencies or config files. Also, does it support custom agent wrappers, or do you require the native CLI?

by timsuchanek

0 subcomment

Let's go! Love that this is a solid OSS alternative to what's already out there!

by straydusk

1 subcomments

Pretty sick. How do you compare yourself with Conductor?

by ahmetd

0 subcomment

very cool!

by thesiti92

1 subcomments

i'll have to give it a shot, the market needs an open source cursor right now

by selridge

0 subcomment

Looks cool! Thank you for sharing.

by ahmadyan

0 subcomment

Congrats on the launch

by leondri17

0 subcomment

LFG!

by redrove

1 subcomments

Is this another VSCode fork? I can’t tell from the readme.

by umairnadeem123

0 subcomment

[dead]