Episode
START pod: Austin Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, Manaflow "Building the open-source terminal for coding agents"
- Podcast
- START
- Published
- Jul 6, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 842
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/533a79e1
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Summary
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 ships primitives, not prescriptions. Developers build the workflow that fits them. Because nobody has figured out the "right" way to work with coding agents yet. And as those agents write more of the code... The bottleneck won't be software. It will be human attention. Austin Wang , Co-Founder & CEO, Manaflow on Fondo START pod 00:15 — Introducing cmux and the YC journey 00:00:50 — Pivoting from enterprise AI to dev tools 00:01:25 — Leaving the IDE for the terminal 00:02:00 — The problem that led to Arc-inspired workspaces 00:02:45 — Notifications for coding agents 00:03:25 — Why developers are…