Steve Yegge is not the shy and retiring type, so when he wants recommendations on how others are managing 10 to 20 (or more) coding agents, he posts the question on X. Specifically, he’s looking for an IDE because “I use Emacs, and I wouldn’t wish it on you.”

The replies (600 and counting) offer plenty of alternatives: Herdr, cmux, Conductor, the Claude and Codex desktop apps, and an impressive assortment of homemade software. For anyone hoping the industry had settled on a sensible way to work with agents, clearly we haven’t. Hence, Yegge’s question.

The most interesting data hidden in the replies, however, isn’t which IDE or IDE stand-in developers are using. Rather, it’s what developers have added to these tools to accommodate the technology’s shortcomings. These include shortcuts to find the agent that needs a decision, ways to recover an earlier conversation, and groupings that explain how a task fits into a project. In other words, despite the incredible intelligence we now have to help us write code, developers are still struggling with the simple task of automating their remembrance of what they asked AI to do.