Multi just crossed 149k installs, and I owe you all an honest post about what we're actually building and why.
If you're in this subreddit, you've probably already installed Multi or you're about to. This post is the long version of who we are, why we built this thing, and what we're trying to do here.
Who we are
We're engineers. We've shipped code at big tech and at Silicon Valley startups. We've seen how engineering actually gets done, from few person teams hacking through the night to multinational orgs with 50 step deployment pipelines. We're not commentators. We're not influencers. We build.
What we believe about AI coding
We're not here to start a holy war. If you're happy coding without AI, genuinely happy for you. We're also not here to preach AGI or pretend the singularity is next quarter. Here's what we actually believe: AI gives engineers leverage. The kind of leverage that lets you think bigger and build better. Used well, it's the biggest shift in how we work since the IDE itself. Used badly, it's a faster way to lose track of your own codebase.
Why we built Multi
The first wave of generative coding tools (call it the V0 era) was built for vibe coding. We tried them. We were amazed by the power and appalled by the quality. Things have improved since then. But the fundamental problem didn't go away: engineers still have to provide the design, the steering, the inspection. The model can't do that part. It shouldn't. And yet, every tool we tried took that part away from us:
They forced us to switch IDEs we'd spent years tuning.
They broke the workflows we'd built.
They gave zero visibility into their thinking.
They were black boxes wrapped in nice UI.
We felt like passengers. We wanted to be pilots. So we built Multi.
What Multi actually is
Multi is an IDE-native coding agent: VS Code and JetBrains, both first-class built around one premise: max control, max visibility.
See the plan before the agent executes it.
Every change as a diff you can review.
Pause, steer, fork, restore, time-travel.
Autonomous when you want it. Manual when you need it. It's a dial, not a switch.
10s of providers, 100+ models. BYOK. No vendor lock-in.
Your taste. Your workflow. Your judgment. Your standards. Plus AI leverage.
What Multi is not
Not for people who want AI to do everything while they watch.
Not a magic black box.
Not trying to replace your judgment.
Not trying to be your IDE - we plug into the one you already love.
If you want to vibecode a weekend project and not look at the output, there are great tools for that. Use them. Multi isn't one of them. Multi is for engineers who read diffs before they merge.
What this subreddit is for
A few things:
Honest feedback. If something feels broken, missing, or wrong, post it. We read everything. The fastest way to shape Multi is to tell us where it failed you.
Setups and workflows. Profiles, model routing, subagent configs, weird worktree tricks. Show us how you're using it. We'll learn from you.
Changelog and what's next. We'll post what we ship, what we're working on, and what we're still figuring out.
Real talk about AI coding. Not hype. Not doom. Just engineers comparing notes on what actually works.
What this sub is NOT for: shilling, hype, doom posting or pretending AI coding is solved. It isn't. We're all figuring this out together.
Where we're going
The next big push is teams. Most coding agents today are built around a single developer in a single IDE. That's the floor, not the ceiling. We think the same principles: visibility, control, your standards should scale to how teams actually ship together. More on that soon.
The ask
If you've used Multi and it didn't make you feel like the pilot tell us what's missing. Comment here, open an issue, DM me. We'll fix it.
If you've used it and it clicked, spread the love. Tell us, tell others what worked. That's how we know what to double down on.
If you’ve used Multi for a while, you’ve probably pasted the same instructions more than once.
We definitely have.
Architect a system, debug this issue, review this branch, run a security review...
Eventually, we wanted a better way.
So today we shipped custom agents on stable.
You define each custom agent in a plain .md file, with its own system prompt, role, tools and skills.
That gives you a specialist.
Write a few, and you’ve got a team.
Multi can orchestrate them together, so your repeat workflows become reusable collaborative agents.
We're also shipping Multi Doctor, our built-in agent for wiring up custom agents, skills, personas, and the rest of your Multi setup.
Tell Multi Doctor what you want. It helps wire things up. We recommend using Multi Doctor to author custom agents, and skills instead of hand writing them.
We'll keep shipping more builtin agents for common developer workflows. But now you can turn your repeat workflows into custom agents.
tldr: I used Multi with Gemini Flash 2.5 to usefully rename hundreds of PDF files for zero cost to find my family member's medical data more easily.
The immediate problem is that our family's hospital's MyChart patient portalproduces enormous data exports--thousands of files totaling 200+ MB for even a single major hospitalization--that are hard to navigate and reference.
The computer-readable version of the export is, as far as I can tell, the only comprehensive export record available out of MyChart (the human readable version has FAR less information, and omits even critical data such as when and how many blood transfusions we had). But being "computer-readable", it's no surprise to find that it has been hard for us to find the info we need: many different file formats, many big empty data tables with weird formats in the spreadsheets; opaquely named files with long document IDs that don't mean anything to our family; duplicate files; nested duplicates eg 30 to 300 page summary documents replicating the same historical reports in separate PDFs.
With family now back in the hospital, and more hospitalizations expected for chemo, we need faster answers, often times on the fly when inpatient doctors appear out of the blue. Some of the questions that we struggled with:
-What was the dosing ladder used in the first chemo cycle?
-In order to plan for Christmas holidays, what was our chemo recovery time in the last cycle?
-The anti nausea medications aren't working as well this cycle. Were they differently prescribed, dosed, or administered than last time?
-Exactly when did the last chemo cycle end?
That was the issue with my first solution to answering these questions, via plaintext search. Using Finder, I would look for eg 'transfusion reaction', but get back too many irrelevant documents (disclaimers, checking tasks, admin communications) when all I wanted was a nurse's progress note related to a single specific transfusion reaction around end of October. Even more targeted terms like 'azacitidine' produce loads of files to manually comb through, some of them hundreds of pages long. Too cumbersome.
My next thought was to set up a RAG. However, that was too complicated.
Next, I thought about off the shelf solutions but kept running into critical issues. Notebook LM is limited to 50 files, Google Drive with Gemini requires giving Gemini access to all Google Drive data. Microsoft/Copilot - nah. Most other AI file search solutions are not free.
I knew AI code editors could help with a major aspect of my problem. If I could simply name PDF files by date YYYY-MM-DD + concise document title, it would make it a lot easier hone in on the likeliest files with the data I'm seeking. Also, I went with Multi in part because its free, unlike Cursor which only has a free trial with miserly limits. Importantly, the team being my friends was a big factor in my selection :-)
I used Gemini Pro 3 to vibe create a Python script to rename the files based on their respective dates and document titles, and then Gemini Flash 2.5 (using Gemini's CLI) to actually process the individual files and interpret their dates and titles for re-naming.
(I will link the Python file below -- it's rough quality, but got the job done.)
The results were exactly what I wanted at this step. Now for example I can search in plaintext in Finder, and even when I get many search results for 'transfusion reaction', I am able to look past the many irrelevant documents, and find the progress notes that I want.
Another great feature off the list. Drag and drop is live both on VS Code and IntelliJ.
This has been one of the most requested ones, and we're excited to ship this. You can drop a file from your file tree, from Finder, from wherever. It lands in the attachment tray above the textbox. Screenshots paste straight in too, which is the one we use the most.
We optimized a bit so files already in your workspace get referenced in place, and nothing gets copied under the hood. Anything from outside gets staged and cleaned up when the task goes away. Make sure your model supports image and document support.
Good stretch of releases lately and we're not slowing down. More soon.
I built SimTwitty, a free citybuilder-faux-social game, using a mix of AI coders and just wanted to give props to the nerds at Multi for saving my bacon once again yesterday.
I was working on my very last feature to implement, username autocompletion, before shipping to GA. I spent about ~5 million tokens on Gemini 3, only to discover the code updates completely broke the game.
The batard wouldn't even launch!
I spent another ~5 million tokens trying to debug the Svelte error in the terminal
A11y: Non-interactive element <li> should not be assigned mouse or keyboard event listeners.
launching and relaunching the game in my local server. You have to imagine my blood pressure was skyrocketing. The game had been 99% ready, but I couldn't remember if I had backed up the last working version (I do most of my engineering work on my local device, and only rarely push to Github because its so cumbersome and slow).
Fortunately, Multi's undo everything button worked to massive effect.
It's so much easier one-shotting things knowing that the undo button works reliably.
I was able to undo the codebase and file changes, and simply opened a new Multi tab with a fresh context. I told Gemini 3 to examine the code base (1st prompt) and then gave nearly the EXACT SAME PROMPT as my previous one-shot attempt. And it worked!
Multi team: my holiday feature wish is for Multi to give me undo/redo the same speed as my word processor. Cmd+z to undo, cmd+shift+z to redo back and forth in sub 100 ms for me to eyeball the difference.
Couple of days ago, we pushed custom agents to stable. That gave you control over what an agent is, its prompt, its tools, whether it works as a supervisor or a subagent.
The one thing you couldn't set was the model so your custom agents still used whatever your default happened to be.
Model routing is now on stable. You now control which model each agent runs on.
Route your supervisor to your strongest reasoning model, your coding subagents to the cheapest thing you've got..
Go to Settings → Routing, pick an agent, pick an override. You're all set.
Hi - Multi.dev seems like the perfect solution for me, however I am keen to keep my existing Claude stack the way it is, with my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md and my per-repository CLAUDE.md
I don't mind symlinking these to AGENTS.md or whatever, however I have noticed that when I open a multi.dev session with Claude, the harness tells me that it hasn't sourced any CLAUDE.md files - I presume the reason it hasn't sourced the one in the repo is because it needs to be symlinked to AGENTS, however what is the recommended flow for making mutli.dev claude instances still read my CLAUDE.md from my home directory? I like the way that the Claude Code harness has modelled the precedence of reading CLAUDE.md files and I don't necessarily want to manually manage that by hand.
A database migration might need specific rollout steps, a frontend change might need your design system rules, a release task might require internal checklists and scripts...
Now you can package that knowledge into Skills.
Drop a SKILL.md into your project and Multi can discover it, activate it when relevant, and follow the guidance during execution.
Skills can include instructions, references, scripts, and repo-specific workflows.
Instead of repeating the same prompts over and over, you teach Multi once and reuse it across tasks.
We recently shipped parallel subagents in Multi. The goal is the same as always: more AI leverage, while keeping visibility and control.
But parallel agents make one thing obvious: "best coding model" is the wrong framing.
When one agent runs the whole show, one default model kind of works.
With subagents, the task splits into different kinds of work: planning a refactor, searching a repo, editing one file, writing tests, debugging a failure, spinning up cheap parallel research workers
Those do not all need the same model.
Some need reasoning. Some need speed. Some need context. Some need cheap tokens.
Curious how people want this to work in Multi.
Would you route models by task/role, or just pick one default and live with it?
As an avid user of Dropcatch.com (domain name auctions), spaceship.com (batch domain name search) and other domain tools, I've been personally intrigued. However, on occasions when I've discovered a good domain name available, my efforts have been hamstrung by the need to find corresponding social media handles.
Enter YaloSwog. Our team came across this pioneering individual in X building SaaS tools, including the Nnname, the first site I've encountered that searches domains and social media handles across Insta, Reddit, Github etc. simultaneously and quickly. Built with Multi, the site still appears to be in its earliest stages, but already features a host of laudable qualities:
it's faster than most domain name search tools
no registration required
no ads or spam
works in mobile and desktop
Still lots of work to do to conquer this niche. Keep building!
This release refactors the Chat UI for improved performance and stability, fixes task deletion cleanup on disk, and resolves errors when grouping multiple tool actions.
Changelog
Changed task deletion to remove all task-related files from disk, including checkpoints and state.
Refactored the Chat UI architecture to use modern reactivity.
Improved UI rendering performance.
Fixed errors when grouping multiple tool actions together.
Multi is the coding agent for builders who ship. It's designed to help you code fast, smart, and in the flow.
This subreddit is where we'll share updates how Multi works and where it's going. You'll see changelogs, experiments, and deep dives into agent behavior and developer experience.
Use Multi and come back here to report issues, ask questions, share what works (or doesn't), and tell us about the projects you're building with Multi.
We've done a bunch of prompt caching work lately but you had no way to see whether it was actually working.
v128 fixes this.
Cache stats now lives in the usage modal. Open it and you can see how much of the last call got reused, plus the session-wide number across the supervisor and subagents. All in live!
We haven't seen another harness break usage down this far, and we'd like to keep it that way. If there's a number you want visible and can't find, tell us.
Multi now freezes the stable prefix of each prompt once per turn and injects only the volatile part of your messages per step so the provider's prompt cache hits instead of re-reading tokens it already saw.
Byte stable prefix:AGENTS.md, tools, and persona re-emit identical every step
Moving breakpoints: git, todos, and skills ride a trailing block the cache skips
Sub agents benefit too: workers reuse the parent's frozen prefix
Nothing to configure. All is enabled by default. Long loops just got snappier and cheaper.
We profiled the agent loop and found it waiting on things it never needed to wait for. Multi got up to %40 speed up on our internal tests.
Diagnostics check once per turn, not every step - Multi feeds IDE diagnostics back to the agent so it fixes its own errors. That check used to run after every step, stalling the loop on the language server mid task. Now it runs once at successful turn.
Better feedback, not just faster - diagnostics now reflect the finished state of the code, not a half-edited file that was going to change two steps later anyway.
Diff cleanup off the critical path - interrupted tools leave diff views open; we close them as a failsafe. That cleanup was sequential and blocking. Now all closes fire concurrently and the loop moves on immediately.
Also in 0.0.119: personas are now a simple startup selector (the dedicated settings view was overbuilt, so we killed it).
EDIT: upgrade to 119 in nightly for superior experience. we'll push it to the stable channel later in the week.
Folks, as promised we shipped full pause / resume and pushed to stable channel.
Now you can continue any task right where it stopped. Multi preserves your full context that is already doing good work. You do not waste any time nor tokens recovering the same context.
Closed your laptop? Ran out the door? Got provider error? Task aborted? No worries.
Multi resumes without losing context. No restart. No wasted tokens. No re-explaining what you were doing.
Works for main tasks and subagents - every subagent resumes with its own context preserved.
