HARNESS EVERYTHING ROUTING ORCHESTRATOR
Why HERO exists
Coding agents can already run long tasks, but the way you operate them is still bolted to one terminal window.
It starts with one specific annoyance
A big refactor or a full test run takes twenty minutes. You cannot walk away for those twenty minutes — not because you need to watch the output, but because it may stop at any moment to ask about a permission, and that prompt appears in exactly one terminal on one machine. The task is asynchronous; the way you operate it is not.
HERO solves that one thing: it moves the interaction into the browser. The session still lives on the original machine and the official CLI still does the work. What changes is where you watch it from and where you answer it from.
We did not rewrite the agent loop and do not plan to. The Claude Code and Codex loops are maintained upstream and evolve with the models; reimplementing one means being permanently a version behind. HERO drives them as they ship and adds the three things they lack: an interface, remote access, and session management.
Push the same idea to several machines and you get the control plane: a team of machines each dial out, and you see every session on one dashboard.
Some deliberate trade-offs
As few dependencies as possible
The server is almost entirely the Go standard library, with three direct dependencies. The frontend is plain JS with no build step and no npm. An auditable dependency chain is a design goal — if you are going to run this on your own machine, you should be able to read what it pulls in.
It renders conversations; it does not browse the machine
HERO renders the conversations the CLIs already wrote. There is no file-read, directory-listing, or diff API. That is not a backlog item — a remote dashboard that can read arbitrary files is an entirely different security model.
Boundaries written down, not glossed over
Self-hosted and hosted have different data boundaries. We put the difference on the page rather than covering both with one nice-sounding sentence. The plan allowances on the pricing page are contractual rather than enforced today, and we say so there too.
Upstream
HERO is a fork of nexustar's usher. Its git history descends directly from usher's, so every HERO commit sits on top of that work. usher is MIT-licensed, so nexustar's copyright notice is retained in our LICENSE. Our thanks for the foundation.