Thurbox

Overview

Check out the Thurbox GitHub Repository and the Website.

A few months ago — before herdr, before orca, before multi-agent orchestration became a trend — I built Thurbox. The initial goal was simple: make Claude Code session management less painful. It grew from there into a full orchestration layer, agent-agnostic at its core, powered by thurbox-cli. The thurbox TUI sits on top: lightweight, low-resource, and a clean way to interact with all your sessions.

Thurbox is built around stability and efficiency. Rather than reinventing the wheel, it delegates the heavy lifting to tmux — battle-tested, reliable, and already excellent at what it does. This means hot-reload style updates work out of the box, and closing the thurbox TUI never kills your sessions.

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Comparison

Already using a session orchestrator? Here's how Thurbox stacks up.

vs Orca

Orca is polished — fancy UI, mobile app, split panes, an embedded browser, a design mode. It first appeared on GitHub in March (Thurbox launched in February). Feature-for-feature, Orca has more.

That said, most of those extras already exist as standalone tools. Need a browser? Firefox or Chromium with a Playwright driver handles AI integrations without the overhead. More critically, Orca replaces tmux with a custom reimplementation that introduces real bugs: new sessions take ~10 extra seconds to start, and display issues are common — not just Claude Code ones.

vs herdr

herdr felt to me like an overengineered solution to a non-problem. It reimplements tmux with a custom Unix socket layer so agents can report their current status — idle, working, blocked, done.

Thurbox solves the same thing differently: pre-configured agent hooks that call thurbox-cli to push status updates. Slightly slower to propagate, yes — but it runs on top of actual tmux, not a reimplementation of it. The rest of herdr is essentially the same stack: Rust + Ratatui TUI.

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The Power of thurbox-cli

(Orca and herdr offer similar capabilities here)

My first instinct was to build a Thurbox MCP server for agentic workflows. But MCP consumes more tokens and is always slower than a well-designed CLI — just look at how gh or glab handle daily PR/MR creation. MCP also rules out simple shell scripts for orchestration.

Here's a practical example for a monorepo with a production app:

• Start one or more operator sessions in worktrees with a custom MCP config — read/write access to the prod backoffice
• Start one or more developer sessions in worktrees with a custom MCP config — read-only access to the prod backoffice
• Start one or more security/quality reviewer sessions running continuous code review across the monorepo

A single shell script. No glue code, no overhead.

set -euo pipefail
REPO="${REPO:-/home/me/code/monorepo}"   # path to the monorepo
BASE="${BASE:-main}"                      # branch worktrees fork from
N_OPERATORS="${N_OPERATORS:-1}"
N_DEVELOPERS="${N_DEVELOPERS:-2}"
N_REVIEWERS="${N_REVIEWERS:-1}"
STAMP="$(date +%y%m%d-%H%M)"
cli() { thurbox-cli "$@"; }

# 1) Operator sessions — RW backoffice, each on its own worktree branch.
for i in $(seq 1 "$N_OPERATORS"); do
  cli session create \
    --name "operator-$i" \
    --repo-path "$REPO" \
    --agent operator \
    --worktree-branch "ops/$STAMP-$i"
done

# 2) Developer sessions — RO backoffice, each on its own worktree branch.
for i in $(seq 1 "$N_DEVELOPERS"); do
  cli session create \
    --name "developer-$i" \
    --repo-path "$REPO" \
    --agent developer \
    --worktree-branch "dev/$STAMP-$i"
done

# 3) Security/quality reviewer sessions — continuous review across the monorepo.
#    No worktree: review the repo as-is (read-only stance comes from the prompt).
for i in $(seq 1 "$N_REVIEWERS"); do
  id="$(cli session create \
        --name "reviewer-$i" \
        --repo-path "$REPO" \
        --agent reviewer \
        --json | jq -r '.id')"
  # Seed the reviewer with its standing instructions.
  cli session send --to "$id" --no-wake --body \
"You are a continuous security & code-quality reviewer for this monorepo.
Loop: pick the most recently changed files, review for security issues, correctness bugs,
and quality regressions. Report findings concisely, then move to the next changed area.
Do not modify code — review only."
done

cli session list

And configure the agents in your ~/.config/thurbox/agents.toml:

[[agents]]
name = "operator"                 # prod backoffice: read/write
command = "claude"
args = ["--mcp-config", "/home/me/.config/thurbox/mcp/backoffice-rw.json"]
new_session_args = ["--session-id", "{id}"]
resume_args     = ["--resume", "{id}"]
fork_args       = ["--resume", "{id}", "--fork-session"]

[[agents]]
name = "developer"                # prod backoffice: read-only
command = "claude"
args = ["--mcp-config", "/home/me/.config/thurbox/mcp/backoffice-ro.json"]
new_session_args = ["--session-id", "{id}"]
resume_args     = ["--resume", "{id}"]
fork_args       = ["--resume", "{id}", "--fork-session"]

[[agents]]
name = "reviewer"                 # continuous code review, no backoffice access
command = "claude"
args = []
new_session_args = ["--session-id", "{id}"]
resume_args     = ["--resume", "{id}"]
fork_args       = ["--resume", "{id}", "--fork-session"]

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Notable Features

Multi-repo context, handled cleanly. Thurbox can create multiple worktrees, place them in the same directory via symlinks, and spin up a session with exactly the context you want — frontend + backend, app + infra, whatever combination makes sense. No manual setup per session.

Remote sessions over SSH. As long as tmux is installed on the remote host, Thurbox handles the rest. Simple config, powerful result.

Windows support. Thurbox runs natively on Windows via psmux.

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Give It a Try

If any of this resonates, the best next step is to just try it:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Thurbeen/thurbox/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Full setup instructions are in the GitHub repository. The website covers the main concepts if you want a guided intro first.

If you run into something broken, something missing, or just have an idea — issues and PRs are very welcome. Thurbox is a side project built out of a real need, and contributions from people using it in the wild are what make it actually useful.