Picks, Shovels, IDEs, and Mux

AI is labeled as the modern-day gold rush so often that the metaphor feels baked into the industry. Investors echo it. Founders rally their teams around it. And the line we hear most is the one about selling picks and shovels, meaning it’s wiser to build the tools developers rely on than to bet everything on the gold itself.

The bigger point is that those tools are changing. Platform teams need a safe way to distribute agents across large engineering groups quickly. Developers need a way to run agentic workloads that have outgrown the confines of the traditional IDE, and the ability to run multiple agents in parallel when a problem calls for it. Speed is a competitive advantage.

That’s why we’re building Mux (coding agent multiplexer didn’t exactly roll off the tongue).

Mux gives them both. It lets enterprises roll out AI coding agents safely and quickly, and it gives developers a place to run agents with increased leverage and more scale than traditional tools allow.

What is Mux?

Mux is an open-source desktop and web application that lets developers run one or more agents in parallel, locally or on their organization’s governed infrastructure. It gives platform teams a self-hosted platform to distribute coding agents across large engineering groups. This is increasingly critical in enterprises and regulated industries where closed SaaS tools like Cursor 2.0 aren’t viable.

For developers, Mux becomes the dedicated environment for long-running testing, fast iteration, rapid prototyping, and deeper research. Instead of forcing everything through a single editor-bound agent, Mux lets developers launch multiple agents side by side and explore different approaches simultaneously. It's where they can assign several hours-long tasks to their favorite high-thinking LLM without bricking their laptops.

Why do we need another IDE?

We’re not building another IDE in the traditional sense. We believe there are already enough VS Code forks; developers aren’t starved for chat-infused code editors. If the code editor is the shovel – the tool developers have relied on for decades – then Mux isn’t a shovel at all. It’s the excavator.

Excavators didn’t eliminate shovels. They just took over the kind of work shovels were never optimized for, like processing tens of thousands of cubic yards of earth – or code – day after day. If you visit any modern mine, you’ll still find plenty of shovels. They’re just used differently than they were before mechanized excavation.

That’s our thesis with Mux. Mux isn’t trying to replace traditional IDEs. If developers’ screentime with their IDE fades, that’ll be a byproduct of how agentic-led development shifts with Mux, not the goal. There will always be a place for the code editor because developers still need a space to work with surgical precision.

What changes with Mux?

Instead of working through a sequential “prompt, wait, refine” loop, developers can work the way they think. They can branch early, send agents down multiple paths of exploration, and shift attention as their capacity allows. This also changes day-to-day work because developers waste less time copiloting single-threaded agent tasks.

For once, the bottleneck becomes human capacity, not the tooling. Platform teams benefit too. Agent usage becomes standardized across the organization rather than scattered across IDEs or unsanctioned SaaS tools. Governance improves, and engineering groups get a repeatable, approved way to offload tasks to their AI agents. When coupled with Coder’s AI Bridge and Agent Boundaries, Mux provides platform engineers with a complete ecosystem that delivers unprecedented observability.

Looking ahead

We don’t believe the future converges on agent execution owned by someone else’s SaaS product. We believe it converges on open, local, and enterprise-governed environments where agents operate at scale and end users remain in control.

We’re building Mux for that world. It gives developers a place to run complex, long-running, and multi-agent tasks without fighting the constraints of an editor-bound DevEx. It gives platform teams a standardized, self-hosted way to bring agentic development to their entire organization on infrastructure they control.

Mux is free and open source. Give it a try and let us know what works, what doesn’t, and what you want to see next.