Show HN: Rostr – Give your agents names, remember who's working on what

Remember who's doing what. 🧙Gandalf is on auth.

rostr automatically gives every agent session a unique name, drafted from a team you set. It works across your machines and in the cloud.

$ rostr stats

work roster

🧙 Gandalf Fix auth redirect loop acme/api 12m

💍 Frodo Flaky e2e tests on CI acme/web 3m

🌱 Samwise Migrate billing to Stripe v3 acme/billing 1h

bench: Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Merry, Pippin

side roster

🐐 Jordan Port the recipe app to iOS me/recipes 40m

👑 LeBron Add dark mode to the blog me/blog 5m

bench: Kobe, Magic, Bird, Curry, Shaq, Kareem

Claude🌱 Samwise · Migrate billingnow

Claude is waiting for your input

Needs your input on the auth redirect loop

Your human brain is designed to remember names, not "abstract workstreams".

A message from 🌱 Samwise tells you exactly which session sent it.

rostr is a small CLI, a few hooks, and a skill for your agent.

Run rostr assemble, or ask your agent to do it for you.

A hook runs rostr draft, so each session's title shows its agent's name and the agent knows who it is.

When a session ends, a hook runs rostr bench to free up the agent's name.

Pick a pre-built roster or rostr assemble your own. Every agent gets its own emoji (which you can turn off).

Tip: different rosters for different projects. Run rostr link in a repo to give it its own roster, so you can tell projects apart at a glance.

rostr integrates with Claude Code and Codex TUI and desktop apps, as well as herdr and tmux.

Set up during rostr assemble, or migrate to the cloud later with rostr cloud on.

Point Claude Code or Codex at this page and it will install rostr, set up the hooks and skill, and help you pick a roster. Agents: your setup steps are at getrostr.sh/setup.md.

Install rostr, then assemble your roster. It walks you through the choices and sets up the hooks. See the script.

curl -fsSL https://getrostr.sh/install | sh

rostr assemble

On a Mac with Homebrew, brew install piazzatron/tap/rostr works too.

Cloud sessions (Claude Code on the web): add the install line to your environment's setup script, set ROSTR_KEY to the key from rostr config key, and allow github.com and api.getrostr.sh in its network settings.

rostr comes equipped with a thoughtfully designed CLI (that you'll never need to touch).

Use the output of rostr stats --json or the list API endpoint to build your own dashboards, monitoring, and integrations.

rostr stats --json

Local or cloud mode. Tasks and repos come back decrypted.

curl https://api.getrostr.sh/v1/stats \

-H "Authorization: Bearer $ROSTR_TOKEN"

Cloud mode. Get your token with rostr config key --token. Rosters and who's drafted come back readable; tasks and repos stay end-to-end encrypted.

{

"rosters": [

{

"name": "work",

"drafted": [

{

"name": "Gandalf",

"emoji": "🧙",

"task": "Fix auth redirect loop",

"repo": "acme/api",

"draftedAt": "2026-10-19T03:12:00Z"

}

],

"idle": [

{

"name": "Aragorn",

"emoji": "👑"

}

]

}

]

}

Why I built this

Because humans name things. We name everything. Names make it easy to find things and remember what you're working on. The more memorable the name, the better.

At first, rostr was born out of a simple concrete need: I had just wired up agents to reach out to me across platforms if they got stuck, and I needed an easy way to trace the messages back to their originating session. Sure I could include a session summary and deeplink back in, but that's not easily scannable. You want names. And emojis. Lots of emojis.

As I played around with it more, I was surprised at how much more pleasant this made interacting with multiple agents. I started to think cross-platform agent identities might be a useful primitive.

rostr is also a bit of a playful experiment in exercising some restraint with agentic development. By the time I've drafted Dumbledore 3, that's a helpful nudge I'm in too deep and this is not a mess I'm going to appreciate untangling tomorrow morning.