I built a CLI to drive every AI coding agent from one interface

TLDR; I got tired of babysitting N terminal tabs of five different coding-agent CLIs. So I built agentproto — one daemon that drives Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, opencode, and Mastra through the same lifecycle, and actually supervises them. Why I built a daemon to drive every AI coding agent from one interface I have a confession: at any given moment I have Claude Code, Codex, and Hermes running in parallel terminal tabs, and I cannot remember which flag spawns which, which one eats --prompt , which one needs --cwd vs cd , and which one will hang forever if I close the laptop lid. simonw described the feeling on Hacker News recently — "Today I have Claude Code and Codex CLI and Codex Web running, often in parallel" — and called it a real jump in cognitive load compared to a year ago. aantix asked, also on HN: "how does everyone visually organize the multiple terminal tabs open for these numerous agents in various states?" I didn't have a good answer. So I built one. It's called agentproto . It is one daemon and one CLI that drives any coding-agent CLI — Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, opencode, Mastra, and a few more — through the same start / prompt / monitor / kill lifecycle, so you stop memorizing five different CLIs. On top of that lifecycle it adds the supervision layer people keep hand-rolling by hand: durable policy gates, nested orchestration, and multiplexed fan-in monitoring. MIT, no paid tier, the daemon itself is an MCP server. This is the story of why it exists. The hand-rolled watchdog The sharpest signal while I was building this came from other people independently re-inventing the same primitives in tmux scripts. On r/ClaudeAI, Confident_Chest5567 posted a writeup of orchestrating agents via tmux panes with a watchdog that resets dead sessions — "a swarm of agents that can keep themselves alive indefinitely." In the same thread, IssueConnect7471 (18 upvotes) described wiring a Redis pub/sub heartbeat plus dead-letter respawn between tmux panes, and arriv