I love Claude Code, but there are three things I really wish it could do:

1. Invoke itself, on a schedule or in response to events
2. Let me talk to it over discord or slack
3. Let me coordinate dozens of Claude Code agents together

This is what herdctl aims to do. herdctl is an MIT-licensed orchestration layer for Claude Code. More accurately, it's an orchestration layer for the Claude Agents SDK, upon which herdctl is built. It's been built in about a week using a combination of Claude Code, ralph wiggum, and GSD. It is not production ready.

Here's a video showing it in action:

You can join the discord server to chat with those Star Trek agents. They're running in a container on an old machine in my homelab so although there's not a whole lot to be gained by trying to talk them into doing bad things, I am expecting people will try. Either I'll have a Lieutenant Worf up in time to guardrail those, or I'll just kill the agents, so YMMV.

Install it with npm install -g herdctl or check out the github repo and docs site for more.

What?

herdctl uses .yml files to define fleets of agents that can be invoked either on by schedule or by trigger. This is a thin wrapper around the Claude Agents SDK configurations, plus a couple of herdctl-specific ones like schedules and hooks.