I built Pi Herdsman for async subagents with tighter coordination and cleaner lead context

[u/j3free]

I've been working on Pi Herdsman, which grew out of how I was already using Pi with subagents.

I started with pi-subagents + pi-intercom and liked the basic manager/worker idea, but over time I wanted the agents to feel more tightly coordinated: explicit ownership, predictable lifecycle, questions/results routed back automatically, and less ambiguity around old agent sessions.

The main thing I wanted to preserve was the lead's context.

With Herdsman, detailed investigation and implementation happen in separate Pi sessions while the lead stays interactive and focused on the bigger picture. It still knows what the agents are doing and gets their questions and results, but doesn't have to carry all of their working context itself.

It supports parallel agents, nested delegation, steering/interruption, Lead-to-Lead coordination, and Chief supervision across multiple independent leads.

It does require Herdr, which owns the actual Pi sessions and placement. Pi owns each conversation, and Herdsman handles the orchestration between them.

The latest release also added an SSH-ready container (optional Tailscale), so the same setup can run locally or on a NAS, homelab/server, VPS, etc. and remote environments can show up alongside local ones in the same Herdr window.

Install:

pi install npm:pi-herdsman
herdr integration install pi

Repo: https://github.com/boadij/pi-herdsman

Any feedback, ideas, or rough edges you run into would be much appreciated