2026-10-13 · 2 min

Six AI assistants is a visibility problem

The hardest part of running a team of AI assistants is not running them. It's knowing which one is waiting for you.

The hardest part of running a team of AI assistants is not running them.

It's knowing which one is waiting for you.

I run my crew through herdr and firstmate. Herdr is where they live, one tab per task. firstmate is the thing that puts them there.

firstmate calls itself an agent distro: a directory of instructions, skills and helper scripts that turns a general-purpose coding agent into a specific one. You talk to one assistant, the first mate, and it spawns a crewmate for each job in its own tab and its own copy of the repo. Ship work comes back as a pull request.

I'm the captain.

The problem shows up around the 3rd assistant. With one, you watch it work. With several, you're switching tabs, and the one you need is the one you're not looking at.

Herdr shows you each tab. What it's got no answer for is the overview: nothing that says which crewmates are working and which have stopped on something only the captain can settle.

Every piece of work is in 1 of 4 states: queued, in flight, finished, or waiting on the captain. A board over the top of the crew answers the two things tab switching can't: what's left to do, and where a decision is required.

So the crew got a window. One screen, 4 columns, the whole team in one look.

Queued means accepted and waiting for a slot, which the tool calls the hold. In flight means a crewmate is on it right now, under sail. Waiting on captain means it's stopped on a challenge only I can answer. Done means finished, with a way to open the result, made port.

The board: four columns, one for each state of the work

I still run a crew of several at once. The challenge that used to cost a round of tab switching now costs one glance. On a narrow window the 4 columns stack into 1 readable list instead of squeezing together.

The same board on a narrow window, stacked into one list

I thought my problem was coordination. What I was missing was a window. The board lives in firstmate as bin/fm-dashboard.sh if you want to steal it, with my version on my fork.