Show HN: Emdash – Open-source agentic development environment

Having built and run agentic systems in production — the "why not agents managing agents" question has a practical answer: the orchestration layer is where the most expensive mistakes happen. Trust boundaries, escalation decisions, when an agent should act vs ask — that's engineering judgment, not boilerplate.

What's future-proof isn't the UI chrome, it's maintaining human visibility into the decision layer. The agents will get better at everything below that line. The line itself is the thing worth building tools around.

Interesting thoughts - thank you! And directionally agree - given that agents are becoming ever better, they'll take more and more of the orchestration on themselves. Still, we believe that developers need an interface to interact with these agents; see their status and review / test their work. Emdash is our approach for building this interface of the future - the ADE :)

We're figuring our business model out. There're two avenues that we principally think about (1) bundled coding agent subscription and (2)enterprise version with auth, team management, sharing of agent interactions. Admittedly, it's early and this can change. What won't change is that this UI layer for running multiple coding agents is and will be open-source. Emdash itself is funded by YC. Initially developed as a tool while working on another product, but we weren't funded then.

interesting! hadn't looked into sparse checkout before, but will do now. Initial thoughts are that sparse might be risky if we lose some arbitrary files that might be relevant context for the coding agents. Will look into this!

looking into this! Thanks for flagging

On it! Released windows out of beta yesterday. signed version sometime this week

We've considered it! The way we're seeing it, this is something that the CLIs themselves are getting good at natively, such as Claude Code. We generally consider ourselves to be at a higher abstraction / task level, where the individual CLIs are responsible themselves for breaking down and distributing a larger task across subagents.

Thanks for your questions! You can separate the agents in Emdash by running them on separate git worktrees so they can do concurrent modifications without interfering. We don't support custom agent wrappers currently, interesting. Have you written your own? What is your use case for them over native CLIs?

> Each agent runs as a task in its own git worktree

If you're talking about shared services, that's another matter.

Conductor is definitely in the same space. Main points of differentiation that I am aware of are that we allow you to connect to remote servers via SSH, natively embed many more coding agents (21) with their full functionality, and are open-source.

great! send all feedback our way :folded_hands:

Not in its purest sense! We're using the monaco editor for file editor and diffs, but other than that no VScode included. The file editor is really a secondary view inside of Emdash. The focus is on the chat with the coding agent. We'll make this more clear in the readme. Thanks for the feedback!