If you start leaning more on coding agents, you quickly realize there are a lot of 2–30 minute windows where you’re just waiting for an agent to implement something or finish a review. In those pockets I generally spinning up small tasks or running a few parallel experiments with different models or approaches. Once you’re juggling multiple threads having isolated working environments becomes pretty essential. We're just trying to make the environment management and that whole workflow much less of a headache. But I don't think this is the best workflow for everyone its just what we've been seeing more people converge towards.
After setting up catnip it seems pretty sweet. The major difference is they are running as a cloud sandbox and we are currently running as a local terminal. Say you don’t want to use any worktrees or do stuff in parallel superset still works as a classic terminal. Eventually we plan on adding cloud workspaces like catnip tho
Thanks for the question. For most traditional web apps using frameworks like Next.js, Vite, etc they'll automatically try the next port if its in use (3000-> 3001 -> 3003). We give a visualization of which ports are running from each worktree so you can see at a glance whats where.
For more complex setups if your app has hardcoded ports or multiple services that need coordination you can use setup/teardown scripts to manage this. Either dynamically assigning ports or killing the previous server before starting a new one (you can also kill the previous sever manually).
In practice most users aren't running all 10 agent's dev servers at once (yet), you're usually actively previewing 1-2 at at time while the other are working (writing code, running tests, reviewing, etc). But please give it a try and let me know if you encounter anything you want us to improve :)
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