START pod: Austin Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, Manaflow "Building the open-source terminal for coding agents"

START pod: Austin Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, Manaflow "Building the open-source terminal for coding agents"

From START by Fondo

July 6, 2026 · 14 min · Episode 132

About this episode

Austin Wang discusses the challenges and solutions in managing multiple coding agents with cmux.com.

10 coding agents running in parallel. Zero idea which one finished. That was the problem. Around November, Austin Wang and his co-founder Lawrence Chen stopped opening their IDE. They weren't writing code by hand anymore Everything ran through Claude Code and Codex in the terminal 10 panes. 10 agents. 10 copies of the repo. And two problems appeared almost immediately. They couldn't tell what each agent was working on. They couldn't tell when an agent had finished. So they built cmux.com: Native macOS Ghostty-based terminal with vertical tabs, notifications, and built-in browser Each workspace shows the task, branch, ports, and pull request - so you always know what every agent is doing. When an agent finishes, it moves to the top with a blue notification ring. Like iMessage... But for coding agents. Who's adopting it first? Staff and senior engineers. It makes sense. They're already used to breaking large problems into smaller ones and delegating the work. The difference now? Instead of junior engineers, they're orchestrating dozens of coding agents in parallel. Even Austin and his co-founder don't work the same way. One prefers worktrees. The other doesn't. That's why cmux…

People in this episode

Guest: Austin Wang

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Manaflow

Products: cmux.com, Claude Code, Codex

Places: macOS

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