Cowboy is the phone companion for Herdr, the terminal workspace manager for AI coding agents. It answers one question at a glance: does any agent need me?
WHAT YOU SEE
Every agent running in Herdr on your machine, ranked by what matters. Blocked agents waiting for an answer come first, in red you cannot miss. Finished turns you have not looked at come next. Working and idle agents stay calm below. Each card shows the agent's title, its workspace, the last lines of its terminal output and a plain-language line: "Waiting for your answer", "Finished, review the result", "Working, nothing needed".
Open an agent for its full output, and when it is asking a question, its options are laid out as buttons.
READ-ONLY BY DEFAULT
Cowboy never types into an agent by accident. Input is off until you switch it on, the bar turns amber while it is on, and it switches itself off after ten minutes without a send. When it is on, quick keys (Esc, Enter, y, n, Ctrl-C, arrows) and a prompt field go straight to the live agent.
YOUR MACHINE, YOUR NETWORK
Cowboy connects over SSH to the machine where Herdr runs, and talks to Herdr's local socket from there. Over Tailscale SSH no key is needed at all. There are no accounts and no servers in between: nothing leaves your own connection. Private keys, if you use them, stay in the phone's keychain.
WHAT YOU NEED
Herdr (herdr.dev) running on a computer you can reach over SSH, for example your laptop or a development server. Cowboy does not run agents itself; it watches and drives the ones Herdr already manages.
Works with the agents Herdr supports, including Claude Code and Codex.
