hackernews_ai Β· Jun 5, 2026 Β· news
Show HN: Lich, start a dev stack per coding agent in parallel
Hey HN, Lich is a worktree aware local dev stack orchestrator. Simply put, it allows you to run multiple copies of your development stack from different worktrees with different code in parallel without going insane. I built Lich because Iβve found myself increasingly using multiple parallel coding agents for development work. I wanted my coding agents to each have independent copies of my development stack to be able to test and validate their own work well. I found that trying to do this totally broke the way I have normally setup tooling for local development. Ports conflict, the UI from one worktree connects to the backend or DB from another one, logs are hard to track down because agents start stacks in the background, any reliability problem sends agents down a rabbithole trying to fix it. I originally built around 5k lines of bash scripts to solve this problem for a single relatively complex application was able to do it, but I realized that for any future thing I might work on I would have to build that whole setup again even though itβs not really that coupled to the specific application Iβm working on. I realized I could build a clean, re-usable abstraction to solve this problem robustly and comprehensively for practically any repo through a standard lich.yaml definition and a simple CLI that manages the stack lifecycle, port allocation, log management, and garbage collection. That is what lich is. You might wonder: why canβt I use docker compose to solve this probl