Shepherd

Shepherd runs sessions, drains backlogs into pull requests, and keeps a human in the loop where it matters — a single mission control for fleets of Claude Code agents.

Start here

• What’s new in 2.6: schedules, a chat for every session, pull requests in Up Next, and a faster loop with a phone UI built for your thumb.
• What’s new since 2.0: the iPhone app, the Operator Assistant, tasks on other machines, the shared browser and security hardening.
• What’s new in 2.0: the Mac app, the shepherd CLI, Sentry auto-fix, CI Watch and the judge.
• Getting started — install Shepherd and sign in.
• Operating Shepherd — run it as a service, expose it over Tailscale, and deploy code changes.
• Authoring an epic — structure a GitHub epic Shepherd recognizes: native sub-issues, the epic-dag fence, and dependency edges.
• Hands-off epics — the automation settings that let an epic drain end-to-end, and what still stops it.
• Configuration — every environment variable.
• Concepts & glossary — the terms Shepherd uses.
• Plugins — extend Shepherd with server-side spawn hooks, routes, and UI.
• External Task API — queue work over HTTP.
• Security — the sandbox membrane and egress firewall.

Acknowledgements

Shepherd is built on herdr, the agent multiplexer by Can Celik — it owns the real interactive PTYs that every Shepherd session runs in, and without it this whole project wouldn’t be possible. Thank you, Can.