Launch HN: Superset (YC P26) – IDE for the agents era

avipeltz · 2026-05-22T14:53:55.000Z

Hey HN, we’re Avi, Kiet, and Satya. We’re building Superset (https://github.com/superset-sh/superset), an open-source agentic IDE for running coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode etc in parallel.Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDHn7gUwfgTry it: https://superset.sh/We’re three engineers who’ve built and maintained large codebases, and we kept wanting to work on more than one thing at a time. Once CLI coding agents got good enough we found ourselves running several of them in parallel: triaging Github issues, adding a few ui features, reviewing PRs, researching a refactor, etc.The funny part was that we and a lot of our friends had all hacked together similar scripts around git worktrees. Worktrees are a nice primitive for this because each agent can get an isolated copy of the repo, but the workflows around them can feel pretty messy, setting up/tearing down environments and managing dev servers.We first posted here a few months ago when Superset was mostly an open-source terminal for managing git worktrees (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368739). Since then, it has changed a lot based on feedback from people using it on real codebases, plus contributions from our open-source community. The product has grown into something closer to an IDE for managing agent work across many worktrees, repos, and machines.The biggest thing we learned is that the hard part is not just “run more agents.” It is managing all the state around them: worktrees, ports, terminal sessions, environment setup, diffs, tasks, and PRs. Once you have five or ten agents running, the bottleneck often becomes remembering what each one is doing and actual human review. We added task / issue tracking so work can move from issue → agent → diff → PR → review without losing the context all in Superset. But there's a lot more work to improve this experience over time.We also launched Remote Workspaces, currently in beta. The idea is that you can run coding agents on remote machines instead of using all the memory and CPU on your laptop, while still managing the work from the Superset desktop app.To support Remote workspaces, we isolated the core functionality of our Electron app into a headless Hono server such that it can be deployed into any workspaces and talk to any client (such as our desktop app, mobile, web, etc) and still provide the same interface that our desktop app has.A lot of our next work is around making agent work easier to manage when you are not sitting at your main dev machine. We’re building more functionality into the Superset CLI, improving remote workspace flows, and working on Superset Mobile (coming soon) so you can check on agents, review progress, and steer work from your phone.We’d love more feedback on Superset, especially if you are daily driving coding agents!

gchamonlive 1 hour ago |

Personally, IDE for the agent era is just Linux.

Kitty with oh-my-zsh, lazyvim and an agent. The entire thing is an ide. If I need to refactor, query data and interact with the system I just use native tools like rg+fastmod, bash, awk, jq... Either writing myself of asking an agent to do the heavy lifting.

Linux in the agent era is a breeze to operate and reason about, so the whole thing becomes a single development environment that's really light on resources and effective.

abirch 46 minutes ago | |

What I've started to do is to use Zulip. You can have different agents in different chats. You can upload files and you update from your mobile phone. At first I thought it was crazy but it's nice not to have 3 different AI agents running in tmux

saddlepaddle 1 hour ago | |

That's an interesting take! Basically Linux / a computer is everything you need to ship code.

If I could provide one gentle pushback - the same way there's utility in OMZ, lazyvim etc., there may be utility in us shipping our CLI etc. - there must exist some software we can build that'll be useful to you as well :)

micro23xd 2 hours ago |

I've been using this for the past few months, and I love it! It's built exactly around my workflow with many worktrees in various repos open at the same time, sometimes with different agents working side-by-side. Before Superset I just used terminal tabs but simply couldn't manage more than like 20 terminal tabs without losing track, so i coudn't scale further. Now i'm running probably 40-50 agent sessions over several repos simultaneously without any issues and losing track! Keep up the good work guys!

kylecazar 1 hour ago | |

Could you elaborate a little on what you are doing with 40-50 agents? I use Claude, I've employed sub-agents, but I still can't wrap my head around how people are using them to that extent.

hoakiet98 1 hour ago | |

awesome to hear this! 40-50 is definitely on the high end. Are you adding any workflow on top to manage that many?

avipeltz 2 hours ago | |

glad to hear it! thank you!

guhcampos 1 hour ago |

We live in this era when folks can vibecode entire startups without ever making a simple Google Search.

https://github.com/apache/superset

dang 8 minutes ago | |

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

CalRobert 37 minutes ago | |

Always preferred the name Caravel...

wavemode 59 minutes ago | |

yeah I was confused coming across this headline - "Huh? Apache Superset is doing a Launch HN?"

hermanschaaf 2 hours ago |

At first glance, it looks similar to Conductor (https://www.conductor.build/). It seems like a lot of these tools are converging on the same general ideas.

Could you share a comparison with the other tools out there?

avipeltz 1 hour ago | |

yeah there is a lot of overlap, we are more terminal first than conductor so you can do can use any cli agent you want. We have a lot more quality of life features around the terminal like notifications, and some things similar to tmux where if you kill the app or update your sessions stay alive and running. We also recently released remote workspaces so you can setup cloud workspaces for your agents. Id say if you like the chat experience conductor is still a bit more polished, we'll get to that level of polish soon, but if you care more about the terminal and cloud and more new integrations we are shipping superset is better.

jnovek 1 hour ago | | |

When you say “terminal first”, are you terminal-first enough that I could use vim buffers for editing?

survirtual 2 hours ago |

Nice. In the right track. I made something similar, but focused on local agents, but we both have issue tracking for managing multiple project and agents in parallel. It works, I think people will be surprised when they start using systems like this.

It is very different from current editors and the direction they are going in. In a way, it undermines the direction they are going. Current editors aim to make engineers 10x or 100x. These editors aim at a different target than the engineers. I will leave it to the imagination on who.

avipeltz 2 hours ago | |

thanks! yeah we daily drive superset so it definitely has been working for us, and yeah these tools are gonna end up looking pretty interesting :)

vmsp 41 minutes ago |

Is anyone actually using agent swarms for anything real?

jerrygenser 48 minutes ago |

This uses separate git worktrees. If we have a local dev setup involving multiple docker services, is there a recommended solution for managing those envs? I didn't see.

saddlepaddle 15 minutes ago | |

We have a concept of setup and teardown scripts if you're interested in checking them out! Together with worktrees, you can make it pretty automatic to making copies of your repo: https://docs.superset.sh/setup-teardown-scripts

Ours are a bit complex but here's an example: https://github.com/superset-sh/superset/tree/main/.superset

bobchadwick 2 hours ago |

I thought this was somehow related to Apache Superset.

https://superset.apache.org/

saddlepaddle 1 hour ago | |

Ah actually we're unaffiliated!

ssalka 1 hour ago |

How do you guys plan to sustain the business, given that your product here is open source & already has many competitors doing similar things?

saddlepaddle 1 hour ago | |

So far we've been growing pretty healthily all things considered!

I think one thing to remember is that the other side of us having dozens of competitors is that if the space couldn't sustain more than 1-2 parallel agent companies, a lot fewer of us would exist. We also will have a lot of time to continue creating value for our customers in the future in new ways :)

hoakiet98 1 hour ago | |

we monetize on teams and, in the future, cloud. the bet is that teams will want to centralize their set up for this type of work, especially shared Linear, GitHub, skills, etc.

pplonski86 1 hour ago |

is it terminal on steroids some kind of? so you can manage mutiple coding agents? how many coding agents you can manage in parallel that it is still comfortable to work and code changes are meaningful

hoakiet98 1 hour ago | |

yes, we surface agent states automatically so you can see what's running or needs attention across the different workspaces. there's a set of tasks where having 5-6 running in parallel is still productive for me such as running spikes and fixing small issue.

As we're investing more into integration test and self-validating for the agents we're able to increase the number without sacrificing quality.

ddxv 2 hours ago |

I'd love a comparison to what's already out there. Don't vscode, antigravity, cursor etc all have agents too?

xnx 2 hours ago | |

Yes. Antigravity switched to primarily be an agent management tool (the previous version of the product became Antigravity IDE). Additionally, most advanced tools automatically spawn subagents.

hoakiet98 1 hour ago | | |

biggest difference is it's terminal first, and optimized for CLI agents. we don't prescribe a specific harness and instead try to work with any CLI harness you bring.

toddmorey 2 hours ago |

I agree with the hard part being managing state, especially environments and ports. I've never used lsof so much in my life.

Question on Remote Workspace: Can the remote machine port forward so I can use a browser to see / test current state of the app on the remote machine?

saddlepaddle 1 hour ago | |

On the docket! Right now the main thing we have enabled is the file system + terminals + ai agents through remote workspaces, but yes dev environments is definitely on the agenda :)

xnx 2 hours ago |

Confusing name. Superset is already an established analytics tool.

hoakiet98 1 hour ago | |

yes, bad choice on my part. the origin was i was planning for it to be a superset of all your dev tools, not thinking about apache superset at all since it was a different domain

bitwize 1 hour ago |

How many "IDEs for the agentic era" do we need?

neals 3 minutes ago | |

As many as we can new idea's from and figure out how to do this more efficiently. It's ok to stick with vim, of course!

saddlepaddle 1 hour ago | |

Fair pushback! The space will settle down eventually, it's just clear to a lot of people that there's a lot of value to be created in this space that hasn't been created yet :)

brod_ie 2 hours ago |

Binding the shell <-> local git clone automatically feels like the future. Great work.

avipeltz 2 hours ago | |

thanks! give it a try :) https://github.com/superset-sh/superset

desireco42 1 hour ago |

I used Superset for quite a while until a month ago. There were some annoying issues, with freezing and terminal not being rendered how it should be. And they did repeated fixes that didn't really solve it. Since I had work to do I moved on.

I installed Zellij on my server where most of work is happening and local machine and this works well for me. There are other issues I have now, but overall flow is fairly natural to what I am doing.

I liked that they did integrate a lot of agent workflow in Superset but my experience was that it would just take too many resources and especially with glitches, it wasn't worth it continuing. I had a period where i enjoyed working in it. It is vibe coded electron app, 2GB! is too much for this kind of app.

I just updated to their new version... it supposedly imported my projects but I can't find anything... so... I guess this is it.

hoakiet98 1 hour ago | |

sorry to hear about the issue. we really messed up on the performance and balancing that with more features. looking into the imported projects did no projects show up on the sidebar for you?

will continue working bugs and hope you'll give it a try later in the future when the product's more stable :)

jimmydoe 2 hours ago |

zed , orca , /.+mux.*/ , ...

they all look incredibly / increasingly the same?

avipeltz 2 hours ago | |

yeah i think theres a lot of ux conventions that are starting to get figured out, but we do want to be different. At least right now most dont well support remote workspace, issue tracking, or review. I bet most of the current ux patterns will look very different in a year

tdi 2 hours ago |

No linear integration in free version and taxing it 20$/m is a bit steep.

saddlepaddle 1 hour ago | |

That's fair! We do have more paid features (a slack integration, remote workspaces etc.) but yeah we haven't found the best balance for which tier to put each in for sure.

drcongo 1 hour ago |

The FAQ says "Superset has a free tier. The source code is available on GitHub under Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2), so you can inspect and self-host it subject to the license terms." - what is self hosting in this context, isn't it a desktop app? Is this why it wants me to sign into something? What exactly am I signing in to?

saddlepaddle 1 hour ago | |

So we also ship a cloud service along with Superset, which enables our Linear integration, Slack integration, and our multiplayer capabilities / remote workspaces.

When you sign in, you're signing into our cloud service!

drcongo 1 hour ago | | |

Got you, thanks. So if I don't need those things I can skip the sign-in?

yannoninator 2 hours ago |

How does this compare to Cursor?

What happens if Cursor makes the exact same features as your product?

saddlepaddle 1 hour ago | |

Actually Cursor is starting to converge with us as we speak! You can look at their new agents mode (which is now their default for new users) as an example.

For what happens, in our heads the end goal is building a software factory where dozens to hundreds of agents are always running - something that nobody has nailed the experience for yet. Until that's a solved problem I hope we have room to grow and build!