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Jathurshan Sownthararasa
Jathurshan Sownthararasa

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Three New AI Agent Tools to Try This Week: Super-Agent, Cartesia, Herdr

#aiagents #devtools #opensource #voiceai

Three agent tools launched between October 29 and 31, 2026. One is a coding-agent prototype from DeepSeek, one is a hosted voice-agent platform, and one is a desktop app for managing coding agents. This post covers what each does, who it is for, what it costs and how to try it in a few minutes.

DeepSeek Super-Agent (dsh-superagent)

DeepSeek's Harness team published Super-Agent as an open-source prototype of a proactive coding agent, announced on October 31. It is scoped to one GitHub repository at a time. It can also listen to Feishu, ByteDance's workplace chat app, for requests from approved team members. Its stated design goal is to use as little human attention as possible while delivering as much value as possible. Reports say it can watch developer group chats and suggest solutions without being summoned.

Treat it as an experiment. DeepSeek itself calls the release a research prototype and not an official DeepSeek product. It also says the public code differs from its internal version, and it tells users to review and adapt the code before running it.

Who it is for: engineers and teams who want to study or experiment with proactive agents.

Pricing: the code is free under the MIT license. You pay for whatever model access you connect.

Get started:

  1. Open the repository and read the manual.
  2. Ask your coding agent to read SETUP.md and set the project up with you.
  3. Point it at a throwaway repo and review everything it proposes.

Link: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/dsh-superagent-prototype

Cartesia Managed Agents

Cartesia launched Managed Agents on October 29 as an end-to-end platform for voice agents. It combines Cartesia's Ink 2 speech-to-text, an LLM you choose and Sonic 3.6 for speech. It handles turn-taking, tool calling and telephony. You can use a Cartesia phone number or bring your own Twilio account or SIP trunk. Other features include knowledge bases and outbound campaigns, with batches of up to 5,000 numbers.

Cartesia reports that the platform ranks #1 of 30 agents on the Artificial Analysis Speech Agent Arena with an Elo of 1115. It also reports 87% accuracy and 91% experience on ServiceNow's EVA-Bench. These are vendor-cited figures, though the Arena result was also posted by Artificial Analysis. Its claim about fewer turn-taking issues comes from internal evaluations, so test it on your own call flows.

Who it is for: teams building phone agents for support, booking or outbound calling.

Pricing: $0.03 per minute at the launch discount, which is 50% off the $0.06 list rate. LLM usage is billed separately, and a Cartesia phone number adds $0.014. A free plan is available without a credit card. A third-party write-up puts its credit at $1, roughly 33 minutes, so check the current plan details on Cartesia's site.

Get started:

  1. Open the agents Playground.
  2. Create an agent by setting instructions, a voice and an LLM.
  3. Make a test call, then attach a phone number.

Link: https://www.cartesia.ai/agents

Herdr desktop app and herdr-core

On October 29, Herdr announced a native desktop app built on a new runtime called herdr-core. Terminals and agents live in the core rather than in the window. You can close the app, quit or update it, and your sessions keep running. The app is built so your agent can change any part of the interface. You can start Claude Code, Codex or any other program from the tab bar. Status is reported through an open protocol, so your own scripts can show up as agents too. The same API is open for building other clients.

The desktop app is separate from the older Herdr terminal app. The app, herdr-core and the TUI are all open source under Apache 2.0. The app runs on macOS (Apple silicon), Linux (x86_64 and arm64) and Windows (x86_64).

Who it is for: developers who run several coding agents at once and want sessions to survive restarts.

Pricing: free and open source.

Get started:

  1. Install with the one-line script from the download page. It also sets up herdr-core.
  2. Open Herdr and start an agent from the + in the tab bar.
  3. Point the agent at the AGENTS.md guide and ask for the layout you want.

Link: https://herdr.dev/download/

How we picked these

Criteria: each item was launched or made available between October 29 and 31, 2026, so it falls inside the 14-day window. Each had to have an official page or repository, a clear audience and a way to try it free or cheaply. We left out items already featured recently, and we skipped political and promotional social posts. Pricing and benchmark figures are as of November 1, 2026 and may change. Launch discounts in particular can end.

Sources

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