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
> “…agents getting stuck in loops, apologizing, and wasting time. We tried to manage this … So we built Zenflow…Cross-Model Verification, Parallel Execution, Dynamic Workflows”
So you got me with the hook, and you bullet three features, but where’s the resolution of the hook issue? You left me with the hook?? What am I missing?
This looks fantastic and I'm excited to try it today!
One question: I see this supports custom workflows, which I love and want to try out. Could this support a "Ralph Wiggum"-style [0][1] continuous loop workflow? This is a pattern I've been playing around with, and if I could implement it here with all the other features of this product, that would be pretty awesome.
[0] https://paddo.dev/blog/ralph-wiggum-autonomous-loops/ [1] https://github.com/onorbumbum/ralphio
Spent a bit of time with the app. I use Zencoder plugins for my personal projects therefore already familiar with their ecosystem.
First of all kudos for the nice UI. I like when apps looks well. Onboarding process was smooth. I paired it with Zencoder's agent (as mentioned I use their VSCode plugin and already had a sub).
I used it to implement a small refactoring for my side project. What I like compared to plugins, I did not have to switch between agents or explicitly ask to write a plan/spec. It's I guess one of the core ideas behind the app and feels really AI-ish because it's not code editor (similar to claude code). The only thing I missed in the process is rendered markdown for previews. But I did not used the app for long, maybe there is an option to render markdown.
Overall great experience so far. Gonna explore it more. Wanna try it with Gemini and Claude Code. Again kudos it's not locked to use only Zencoder's agents.
Tested it for a while. Great that I can finally run my SDD workflows easily without juggling bunch of Claude Code commands in terminal.
Also, I found unexpected use case for it. Even when I need to only change couple lines of code, I just run quick fix workflow for it, because Zenflow automatically creates worktree, branch, commit etc. And PR is created with few clicks. It'll seems like a minor thing, but it irritates me a lot to do all this stuff myself for small changes. One thing I miss here is automatic PR name and description creation according to templates my company uses.
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.
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)
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.
The app is really good, gave it a quick spin earlier, quite like it!
FYI: advanced tracking protection in Firefox breaks your download form
Quick fix:
Apple Silicon (ARM64): https://download.zencoder.ai/zenflowapp/stable/0.0.52/app/da...
Intel (x64): https://download.zencoder.ai/zenflowapp/stable/0.0.52/app/da...
We'll figure out the FF script blocking.
:-0 thanks for lmk, will get back to you on this asap
ok, this tool really did some magic for my poor promt "create a game like google chrome has when wifi is off". i also like that it kinda teaches me on proper spec development and thinking for me about the tests and things i needed to specify in the first place.
nice
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.
Thank you!
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.