Herdr, a solo project by Can, is joining Y Combinator's F26 batch. Initially conceived as a solution to the perceived bottleneck of managing development agents, Herdr focuses on a runtime that integrates with existing terminals, offering first-class primitives for agent management. The project emphasizes a persistent, anywhere-runnable runtime, initially accessed via a bundled Text User Interface (TUI).

Despite the TUI's success and the emergence of over 500 plugins and third-party clients like Raycast extensions and iOS apps, the need for more clients and features has led to this expansion. The open-source runtime, now under the Apache-2.0 license, will remain free and accessible, allowing developers to build upon it. Herdr aims to become a company focused on developer tools for agent management, with plans to build a small team to enhance the runtime's robustness and extensibility while keeping the core lean and encouraging innovation through extensions.