About Horde

Source code: gethamster/horde, licensed under Apache-2.0.

Horde is a developer tool: a local Rust daemon that turns one objective into a durable workflow and coordinates coding agents against a Git repository. It is licensed under Apache-2.0, free to use, and distributed as signed releases you install with a single command from the installation guide.

What it is for

Coding agents are good at bounded edits and bad at surviving. A session ends, a laptop sleeps, a process is interrupted, and the work is gone. Horde puts durable state underneath that work. Every task, step, attempt, worker, message, artifact, and question is recorded in SQLite, so an interrupted run resumes from where it stopped rather than starting again. Workers run in isolated Git worktrees and claim exclusive file paths, which is what makes running several of them against one repository safe.

It is deliberately local-first. The daemon runs on your own machine and drives the coding agent CLIs you already have installed and authenticated. There is no hosted service, no account, and no upload of your source. Remote execution is opt-in: you pair additional hosts over your own Tailscale network, each with its own data directory, concurrency ceiling, and executor credentials.

How it is built

Horde is written in Rust and ships as a single binary for macOS and Linux on Apple Silicon / ARM64 and x86-64. Coordination state is SQLite. Host-to-host communication uses mutually authenticated gRPC over TLS with per-host certificates. Agents integrate through a stdio bridge that speaks the Model Context Protocol, exposing the same operations the CLI uses.

Releases are signed with an Ed25519 key whose public half is published at /release-key.pem and pinned by fingerprint at /release-key.hex. The installer verifies the signature and checksum before it installs anything, without requiring you to install OpenSSL first.

Agent skills

Horde ships three skills for the Agent Skills Protocol at https://github.com/gethamster/horde/tree/main/skills: horde for an agent driving Horde, horde-templates for authoring workflow templates, and horde-worker for an agent running inside a Horde task. Install them with npx skills add gethamster/horde.

Maintainer

Horde is built and maintained by Andrew Somervell. Bug reports and feature requests belong on the issue tracker; see contact for other ways to get in touch.

Horde is an early release: parts of it have been exercised against real services and parts only against fixtures. Treat it accordingly, and report anything that surprises you.