Why Your Coding Agent Terminal Becomes Unreadable Past Three Panes
You open one terminal pane for the orchestrator. Two for the agents you spawned. By the fourth pane, you are scanning text instead of reading it. That is not attention. That is flicker.
What pane multiplication actually costs
Two agents fit because you can watch both peripherally. Three breaks peripheral vision. Four means each pane is too short to show a full error stack. You switch panes to read anything useful, which means you stop watching the others.
The cost is not screen space. The cost is the switch itself. Every pane switch is a context swap in your head, not just in the terminal. Three swaps per minute for ten minutes and you have lost the thread of every agent.
What changed when I stopped using panes for state
I still use panes for the work I am doing by hand. I stopped using them to track what agents are doing.
Each agent now lives in its own Herdr workspace, attached to a Git worktree, attached to a branch. The panes still exist. I do not watch them. I query them.
herdr agent list
herdr agent read <name>agent list gives the fleet in one table. agent read dumps the last buffer from one agent without switching panes. The terminal becomes a place I do work, not a place I track work.
Why this scales past four agents
The readable ceiling for simultaneous panes is around three. The readable ceiling for agent list output is much higher, because you scan one table instead of switching between N buffers.
On my machine, I run three heavy worktrees in parallel comfortably. I have run five briefly. The constraint stopped being the terminal and started being my review budget. That is the right constraint to hit.
What this does not solve
Reading output in one table does not mean the agents are coordinating. Agent A can be finished while agent B is blocked on a question agent A already answered. The terminal bottleneck is solved. The coordination bottleneck is not.
That part is on you, at the planning layer.
Before you open another pane
Count your open terminal panes right now. If the number is above three and you cannot describe what each one is doing in one sentence, the next move is not another pane. It is one command that lists them all.
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