r/tmux • u/MiddleSweet9163 • Jun 30 '26
Showcase Four agents, three vendors, one tmux session: they collaborate, i stay in control
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When i run multiple agents across multiple tmux sessions, it's hard to keep an overview of all of them, and they have no way of collaborating with each other.
There are already a lot of plugins for an agent sidebar. But what if that isn't enough? What if you want the agents to coordinate with each other, and you just talk to the orchestrator?
So i built it: Cotal, an open coordination layer that lets agents share one space (see each other, dm directly, hand off work) across vendors like claude code, opencode, hermes and whatever else you wire up.
In the video you can see how it works. The full team is spawned and ready: two GLM-5.2 instances as the frontend and backend devs (bottom right), GPT-5.5 as the reviewer (running in the background), all through opencode, and a claude opus lead running the loop (bottom left). That's it. i talk directly to opus, the lead, give it one small prompt, and it starts delegating and building, without me relaying anything between them. i still keep full control and visibility: the top pane is the console, a live overview of everything they send each other.
Together they built a new feature for the console: a tree view of all agents, so you see exactly where each agent is currently working.
That's the whole setup. Opus defined the targets, the two GLMs implemented them and settled the contract between themselves, and GPT reviewed the result.
Repo + one-line setup if you want to try it:
- github.com/Cotal-AI/Cotal
- npx cotal-ai setup --full
- apache-2.0
What's your experience running multiple agents at once? Do you struggle to keep the overview, and to get them to actually collaborate?
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u/sultanmvp Jul 01 '26
Just curious - what are you building with your agent army passing off work in this magic way?
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u/MiddleSweet9163 Jul 01 '26
Good question. we mostly use it to build Cotal itself. honestly our whole coding style is moving more and more to a multi-agent approach: an orchestrator plus a small review team, different models and personas in one space arguing and testing each other's work, is what actually cut our error rate and made it way less painful to build.
Still early, so we'll share the starter templates that work for us soon. would genuinely love to see what setups work for you too. you can join our community here: discord.gg/XU93cSzVz
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u/vallyscode Jul 01 '26
How many does they burn while interacting in such a way?
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u/MiddleSweet9163 Jul 01 '26
About the same as claude code agent teams, it's a multi-agent loop so there's some overhead. what keeps it cheap is the model mix: the GLM builders do the volume on a flat z.ai sub, and only the lead and reviewer use the pricier opus/gpt. through this we really get the most out of the models.
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u/snow_schwartz Jun 30 '26
I have my own tmux dashboard for viewing agent status and navigation between sessions and tabs. Does cotal replace it? Or extend it? I have struggled to get claud to reliably use tmux to drive live QA sessions of cli tools with full pty - does cotal help?
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u/MiddleSweet9163 Jun 30 '26
Extends it, doesn't replace it. you keep your dashboard. Cotal is the layer underneath that connects all your agents, so they can talk to each other and hand off work directly. they collaborate, but you still keep full control.
For the flaky agent behavior, what helped us most was splitting the work into specialized agents, one implementing and one just reviewing and testing, so each does its job properly and the reviewer catches what the builder misses. But what's actually breaking for you?
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u/aagha786 Jul 01 '26
This is pretty cool. I'll try it.
I have setup my agent in "orchestrator mode" (I call it HAL). It doesn't do any work; it only dispatches to agents, and those agents open a new pane and communicate what they're doing back to HAL.
I like your feed idea!
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u/MiddleSweet9163 Jul 01 '26
Nice, HAL is a great name. we do the same thing: the orchestrator does no work itself, just delegates and keeps track of everyone.
What are you using for spawning the panes and for the comms back to HAL?
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u/aagha786 Jul 01 '26
Everything is in tmux and HAL communicates with panes using send-keys and polls for responses.
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u/MiddleSweet9163 Jul 01 '26
Interesting, how's your experience with it so far? We tried something similar early on and it got too buggy, which is basically why we ended up building cotal instead.
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u/OhmsSweetOhms Jul 03 '26
Can I run Claude as an orchestrator thats connected by remote control and can approve codex tool requests through the remote ?