Lab · Field note

Let them sort it out

For about two weeks now I've been running Claude Code on my own server, with herdr.dev managing what would otherwise be a terminal nightmare. Then @peer messaging shipped natively into Claude Code, and the timing could not have been better. My sessions can talk to each other now instead of routing everything through me. It has been an absolute godsend.

Five ways I've used it

Two sessions building the same thing. Two sessions were unintentionally building different corners of the same feature and started to diverge. Once I realized they were overlapping, I instructed one to message the other and sort it out. They traded migration SQL, agreed on a shared design, and even coordinated the merge order.

A solved problem, handed over. Two sessions that started concurrently hit the same design problem at different times. The second session messaged the first one (that I'd already walked through the solution) and had the fix in hand.

Tab names that keep themselves current. Keeping up with herdr tab names was laborious. I created a /herdr-sync skill that messages all the open sessions on the box, asks what they're working on, and then runs a script to update all the tab names.

Lane 2 feeding Lane 1. Lane 1 is for feature work. Lane 2 is for framing and shaping a queue of items to always keep Lane 1 busy. When they happened to finish simultaneously, Lane 2 seamlessly handed off a freshly shaped feature to Lane 1 to keep it churning.

A fix that broadcast itself. One session tripped over something in one of my development workflow reference files. It wrote a fix, pushed it to GitHub, and messaged all its peers to read it and adopt the change.

What I learned

The learning here was all curiosity driven. A situation presented itself, I wondered, "Can they figure it out so I don't have to get in the middle?" and I let the experiment results guide my usage.

Once I notched ad hoc successes, I moved to integrating the capability into its most obvious use case, session management skills. It's easy to get lost in terminal windows even when they're well organized, so /herdr-sync was born.

The experiments

  1. Aug 18, 2026

    Systematized it into a skill (/herdr-sync)

    Hypothesis: if it works when I manually direct it, then I can build it into a skill to solve an annoying problem. The change: /herdr-sync, a skill that messages every open session on the box, asks what it's actually working on, and runs a script to relabel all the herdr tab names with current scope. Result: still tuning it, but it's going to become a daily skill.

  2. Aug 10, 2026

    Ad hoc: told the sessions to talk to each other

    Hypothesis: if I let the agents talk to one another, they'll sort it out faster and better than I can myself. The change: no setup at all, it was just noticing. If I can imagine the two session agents as peers that could resolve something with a conversation, it was a great candidate. What happened: the five uses above. The two building the same feature traded migration SQL and coordinated their own merge order; the second session got a solved design problem handed to it by the first. Each of these situations ended with a self-satisfied smile and a "good job lil' Claude homies". Result: Hell yeah, peer messaging.