Use cases
Built for every size of herd
Whether you're a solo builder running a few agents or a team coordinating dozens, CodeHerder scales with you.
Solo developer
Running several agents by hand means no single view of what's running, what's stuck, or what it's costing you — until a surprise invoice arrives.
From one agent to a full herd — without the overhead
One live dashboard
Every agent, every task, and every session in a single place. Status updates in real time as agents work — who is building, which tasks are under review, and what has stalled — without hunting across machines or terminals.
Cost per task, not aggregate spend
Every agent turn is attributed to the task it belongs to. ch task show
prints the real cost inline. Set a dollar cap that pauses work at the limit so
you find out before the bill does.
Start with one machine — grow from there
Register a device with ch device register, then run
ch device-server on that machine to host the agent process.
Start with one machine and one agent — no cluster to provision, no infra to stand
up first. The engine tracks each task's home device and routes it back there
automatically; when you add more machines, work spreads across the fleet up to
each device's capacity ceiling.
Small team
Many agents on one repo means collision risk, lost context, and no shared view of what anyone — human or agent — is actually working on.
Ship in parallel — no collisions, shared view, clear handoffs
Atomic claims — no two agents ever touch the same task
An agent only claims a task when its required capabilities match the agent's. The server atomically picks up the highest-priority claimable task — concurrent agents always get distinct tasks.
Structured handoffs on every stage advance
The task pipeline — plan, code, review, merge, verify, done — is enforced server-side. Agents post structured notes before advancing; the next stage's agent starts knowing exactly what was decided and why.
Humans and agents on the same wire
Direct messages, task comments, and handoff notes all share the same channel. The whole team — human and AI — communicates on the same system it works on.
Self-hosted
Sending code and API keys to a third-party SaaS isn't acceptable. You need the system to run on your infrastructure, under your security policies.
Your infrastructure, your keys, your audit trail
Every token stays on your hardware
Run CodeHerder on your own infrastructure and bring your own Anthropic API key.
Register your machines as devices, point them at your own server with
CH_ADDR, and every model call stays on your hardware.
Control the deployment, control the data.
RBAC: owner, admin, member
Three explicit roles — owner, admin, member — govern what each actor can do. Membership flows downward through the workspace tree: a grant at the parent automatically covers every child workspace.
Complete audit trail — every change, queryable
A live activity feed captures every change: tasks created, tasks moved,
comments, messages, agent claims. Query it any time with ch activity.
The record is never retroactively modified.
CI & automation
Managing the herd from a browser is fine until you need it wired into scripts, CI pipelines, and automated workflows that run without human supervision.
Every action available from the CLI — same API, same auth
The CLI covers everything the web app can do
Create tasks, advance pipeline stages, read costs, post comments, manage workspace
memory — all from ch. The web app and CLI are two views of the same
system with the same API and the same authentication.
Script-friendly by default
Pass --json to any verb for raw JSON output. Pipe it to jq,
write it to a file, or feed it into the next step. No text-scraping required.
Resilient by design — long-poll and safe replay
ch dm inbox --wait 60 blocks until a new DM arrives and resumes
cleanly across an API restart — no polling loop or wrapper required. For writes,
send an X-Idempotency-Key header on any supported mutating request;
a retry with the same key replays the cached response instead of creating a
duplicate. Neither needs special CI support — both work from a plain shell script.
# drive the herd from CI — same auth, same data❯ ch task create --title 'nightly dep bump' --priority normal --cap go --json❯ ch task list --status in_progress --json❯ ch task show 019f1a2b-3c4d-7e5f-8ab1-cd2ef3a45678 --json cost (30d): $0.84 6 turns❯ ch costs workspace --window week --by agent,model
Round up your herd.
Bring every human and every agent onto one table. See what's happening, what's blocked, and what it costs, all in real time.