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Maxxwell

The IDE for Optimal Tokenmaxxing

Details

External ID
49625975
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Maxxwell
Website domain
maxxwell.dev
Launched
Sept. 9, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
11
Upvotes percentile
0.6220095693779905
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 13, 2026, 5:56 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 13, 2026, 5:56 p.m.

Description

Hi HN! I’m Michael, one of the founders of Rindler (YC S26). We built Maxxwell, which helps you manage a dozen coding-agent sessions’ progress, context, and blockers. This lets you spend more time with the actual high-leverage decisions (and gives you more confidence in stepping away from your computer). We were originally building browser agents that log in to sites with a cached representation of the site to make for cheap and reliable repeat runs. There were a ton of hard challenges like mapping sites, getting past bot defenses, and handling credentialing and 2FA. There was a huge maintenance surface, and we were getting bogged down with technical deliverables.We tried Cursor, Claude Code, Conductor, and even built an internal Devin. These tools either felt like they were too slow to iterate through large tasks, or became black boxes that I just couldn’t trust with their decisioning (you can’t just tell Devin to “improve the site mapper” and call it a day, unfortunately). So, we eventually settled on twelve Claude Code sessions running across our terminal panes. You get more control over the work being done while still multiplying your output volume, albeit at a cost: you.Answering questions across twelve terminals is really draining. Also, a lot of the questions are niche code choices that crowd out the stuff actually worth your opinion. It’s not immediately obvious which sessions are making progress, which are stuck on something trivial, or which are getting lost in the sauce of making up new goals. Lastly, I just felt less like a conductor of agents and more like just the human medium connecting Claude to my workspace.In the pursuit of touching grass again, we jerry-rigged our own system, which has an orchestrator agent focused on keeping other sessions aligned towards their goals and parsing through the agent noise. Now, I primarily message that one orchestrator session alone. It tells me what’s landed, what’s been decided for me, and what actually needs my input. Every worker is an unmodified Claude or Codex process in a real PTY, so you can still attach to any session and interface with it. This functionally results in all the productivity and quality benefits of multiplexing sessions while hopefully keeping you sane.Here's a 90 second walkthrough of the IDE: https://www.loom.com/share/125c58d597234685b1a632839a83813aIn the last month that we’ve been using this, merged PRs per prompt (at similar semantic weight) has gone from 0.9 to 5, and our revert rate of said PRs has fallen from 0.56% to 0.20%. We are confident letting the orchestrator manage our agent sessions for hours at a time, and it works quite well for overnight runs too.Maxxwell is BYOK or subscription, and otherwise free and fully local. We’re considering making a hosted service as well to save your local machine’s memory. Check it out! If you’re already running several agent sessions at once, I’d especially like to know:- What would make you trust that an unattended session stayed aligned? We currently have per-goal checklists that the orchestrator monitors to ensure adherence.- What’s your preferred balance of agent autonomy and control?

Enrichment

Theme
AI agent frameworks and developer tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
AI feature
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
ide for optimizing ai token usage
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While the UI and state dashboard can be vibe-coded, managing dozens of concurrent autonomous agent sessions with context management, token tracking, and Git worktree isolation has significant edge cases.

What it would actually take: Requires a desktop app (Tauri/Electron) or server managing multiple concurrent child processes in isolated Git worktrees. It must ingest stdout/stderr streams, parse agent states, track token usage across multiple vendor APIs, and handle interactive terminal prompts programmatically. The complex process management, worktree manipulation, and robust failure recovery require solid systems engineering.

Discussion

8 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Claude Code, Codex

Concerns raised: Orchestrator becoming a black box with opaque decision-making, Orchestrator mistakes having wider impact than individual worker errors, Difficulty managing and parsing multiple agent sessions, Risk of trusting orchestrator without adequate visibility into underlying decisions

Feature requests: Enhanced observability and inspection tools for orchestrator decisions, Per-goal checklists and concrete progress tracking beyond status reports, Ability to directly inspect and redirect individual worker sessions, Better visibility into which decisions require human attention

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 377 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #157 of 378 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 313 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.