Hi, I tried Juggler a few months back, and while it's technically impressive as a one-person product, I found it super stressful to use. It emits so much output and activity, in various nested forms.
Where Claude Code and Codex have made progress recently, I feel, is with sharpening the interactivity. For example, Codex will emit a lightweight ream of "thinking", then on completion it will erase this and only show the final, coherent answer. It doesn't show much detail about which commands it runs, either. You can still drill into that, but it's usually the least important thing. Claude also does sub/side-sessions that can talk to the other sessions. So if a session finds an unrelated, pre-existing bug, it can start an adjacent session for the bug fix, and keep abreast on when the fix lands. If you start a side session to do research, it can message the other session with new findings.
I don't know if Juggler is still like it was, but I strongly recommend making it less verbose. I just couldn't deal with the noise.
Thanks - that's really interesting feedback!
I guess my schtick with it has always been that I wanted to see all the hidden stuff that claude and others try to hide away inside their "made a bunch of tool calls" type opaque messages. And I've heard from other people who appreciate it for that reason, but really interesting to hear that you found it stressful! I'll definitely go away and have a think about that.
I did add a feature a few weeks ago which lets you toggle whether it folds groups of commands into a single summary item (in juggler style the column view works really well here because you can still browse into those groups and see the tool calls if you want). I've found myself not using that mode because I like to see all the detail, but your comment makes me wonder if that should be the default, and if maybe I should add other "less detail" modes.
People work in different ways, of course. From my perspective, agents have gotten so good that there is no reason whatsoever to look at what they are doing while they're doing it.
I think we are moving in the direction where agents work a lot more autonomously. Most of my work these days is done by cooperative teams of remote, autonomous agents. They can work for hours and periodically reach out to humans with questions and updates. But there's rarely any point in looking at their work (mostly diagnostic or auditing purposes). So for me, at least, the days of staring at the agent's output are long gone.
But I still use local harnesses for some tasks, and I'm not happy with OpenCode's desktop app. I'd be nice to have a viable alternative.