alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Proliferate- open-source, self-hostable Codex for any coding agent
Hi HN- I'm Pablo, the founder of Proliferate (YC S25)!
Proliferate (https://github.com/proliferate-ai/proliferate) is an open-source, self-hostable AI IDE that lets you work and automate tasks with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, and Grok in one place.
Here's a quick 2m demo of how we use Proliferate to build Proliferate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNX0oaWmBY
I started building Proliferate after my team onboarded to OpenAI Codex. Within days, we were using it for everything: using computer use instead of navigating websites ourselves, having Codex coordinate other agents, and setting up automations for recurring work. We really never needed to leave the desktop app to get work done.
If my team’s experience is anything close to representative, a Codex-like app (a horizontal agent with a beautiful UI) is the main interface every company is going to use to get work done. That is perfectly in line with OpenAI’s mission to make Codex the everything app (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796469).
But as we started automating work closer to the core of the business, I wanted to work with agents from all the labs, including open-weight models, without becoming increasingly dependent on OpenAI.
And that’s what Proliferate is for! It's the open-source, self-hostable Codex that preserves your optionality across agents and model providers while building toward Codex’s breadth.
Today Proliferate supports:
* Working with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, and Grok with their native inference and configuration options, including Bedrock, Azure, and self hosted inference.
* Inter-agent communication and management: a parent agent can spawn and communicate with another supported agent as a subagent (I personally like to have Fable delegate to Codex, with OpenCode models reviewing PRs).
* Building workflows- one of the features I'm most excited about. These are re-usable chains of agent sessions and human approval gates, with the harness and model chosen per step and documents passed between them. I use this to automate code review, QA, and my PR construction process.
All of Proliferate is 100% open source under AGPL-3.0. There are still definitely some rough spots, but we’re building fast and I’d really love any feedback!
Comments
I’ve been looking for an opensource/self hostable Cursor for the last few weeks. I tried this, OpenHands, Opencode Manager and Paseo.
I couldn’t get Proliferate to run on my PC and be controlled on my Mac/iphone. It was frustrating to set up and the docs confusing.
Paseo on the other hand was very easy to get working and docs clear. I very highly recommend it as a solution in this space. I am not affiliated at all with this project.
I tried setting up opencode for the server, but it just won't persist my conversations. Hows the mobile/client access on this? Claude remote works well... for Claude... but I havent seen anything comparable open source.
edit: tmux + terminal harness is my current go to
Does each harness keep its native auth and subscription, or do requests eventually route through you?
why would someone use this tool over Codex? Can't I use Codex with any model?
Friendly ask: get the windows exes codesigned
The open-source route makes a lot of sense here. So excited!
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How does this compare to https://github.com/pingdotgg/t3code or https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo?
Is there a good resource indexing all the coding agent tools / harnesses? Every awesome list I've found so far seems very incomplete, but I'm sure its impossible to keep up.
My daily drivers are still:
- exe.dev + Shelley + terminal multiplexer (https://zmx.sh/ or tmux) + `codex` CLI - Conductor.build
I would love an open source solution with nice desktop / web / mobile / remote options and notifications, but seems like it could be a while before things settle down and the "winners" emerge?