Show HN: Zenflow – orchestrate coding agents without "you're right" loops
8 comments
·December 16, 2025thecoderpanda
The multi-model approach makes sense. We've noticed different models handle different things better, so being able to run them side by side is pretty useful. The dynamic workflow stuff is neat. Most tools are too rigid once you start. Will be interesting to see how it handles unexpected turns.
Doublon
FYI: advanced tracking protection in Firefox breaks your download form
andrewsthoughts
:-0 thanks for lmk, will get back to you on this asap
Pablosanzo
This is the next step after SDD: a system that enforces the orchestration to execute the spec. I appreciate that you can bring your own agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Zencoder)
Yoric
I suspect that we'll eventually loop back to formal specifications, with formal or semi-formal verification that the implementation matches the specification, but with agents writing the actual code.
celeryd
The language used on the website is very fresh! They are brave enough to call bad AI output "slop", which immediately makes me think they are trustworthy, that they are in the know. An AI bandwagoner wouldn't be brave enough to call it slop.
Then there's a blurb about the CEO who claims "AI doesn't need better prompts. It needs orchestration." which is something I have always felt to be true, especially after living through highly engineered prompts becoming suddenly useless when conditions change because of how brittle they are.
I might even give this a shot and I usually eschew AI plugins because of how cloud connected they are.
I am a nobody, but I think these people are making a bunch of right moves in this AI space.
andrewsthoughts
Thank you!
gk39
Interesting! Just tested and it's quite impressive so far. I use multi-agent workflows on a daily basis. Overseeing them and limiting hallucinations has become a major pain for me. This is much needed.
Hi HN, I’m Andrew, Founder of Zencoder.
While building our IDE extensions and cloud agents, we ran into the same issue many of you likely face when using coding agents in complex repos: agents getting stuck in loops, apologizing, and wasting time.
We tried to manage this with scripts, but juggling terminal windows and copy-paste prompting was painful. So we built Zenflow, a free desktop tool to orchestrate AI coding workflows.
It handles the things we were missing in standard chat interfaces:
Cross-Model Verification: You can have Codex review Claude’s code, or run them in parallel to see which model handles the specific context better.
Parallel Execution: Run five different approaches on a backlog item simultaneously—mix "Human-in-the-Loop" for hard problems with "YOLO" runs for simple tasks.
Dynamic Workflows: Configured via simple .md files. Agents can actually "rewire" the next steps of the workflow dynamically based on the problem at hand.
Project list/kanban views across all workload
What we learned building this
To tune Zenflow, we ran 100+ experiments across public benchmarks (SWE-Bench-*, T-Bench) and private datasets. Two major takeaways that might interest this community:
Benchmark Saturation: Models are becoming progressively overtrained on all versions of SWE-Bench (even Pro). We found public results are diverging significantly from performance on private datasets. If you are building workflows, you can't rely on public benches.
The "Goldilocks" Workflow: In autonomous mode, heavy multi-step processes often multiply errors rather than fix them. Massive, complex prompt templates look good on paper but fail in practice. The most reliable setups landed in a narrow “Goldilocks” zone of just enough structure without over-orchestration.
The app is free to use and supports Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and Zencoder.
We’ve been dogfooding this heavily, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the default workflows and if they fit your mental model for agentic coding.
Download: https://zencoder.ai/zenflow YT flyby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Ai-klT-B8