Summary
What. Give every agent pane a live status (blocked, working, or done) shown right in the sidebar, on the pane tabs, and next to Pane Chat, so you can see what all your agents are doing without opening each one.
Why. When you've got a few agents running, there's no way to tell which one is stuck waiting on you versus still working versus already finished. The current dot is just active/idle, so "needs your approval" and "still thinking" and "done ages ago" all look the same.
How. Read each pane's live terminal screen, its window title, and whether bytes are still flowing, and turn that into blocked / working / idle. A little debounce keeps it from flickering on spinner gaps or startup. Roll the panes up per session (blocked wins, then working, then idle) and color it. A session that finishes while you're looking at something else shows as "done" until you open it. Plain shell panes get no badge.
Visual overview
No mockup yet. Rough idea of the states:
| Status |
Meaning |
Sidebar row bar |
Tab / Pane Chat dot |
| blocked |
waiting on your approval |
red |
red dot |
| working |
actively running |
amber, up/down loading sweep |
amber spinner |
| done |
finished while you were away |
blue |
blue dot |
| idle |
finished and seen |
green |
green dot |
| (no agent) |
plain shell pane |
neutral |
none |
Non-goals
- Persisting status across restarts. It's live only, so a session you never opened shows nothing. Could be a follow-up.
- Touching the existing 30s active/idle pipeline. This is a separate, faster layer on top.
- Parsing agent transcripts line by line. It's screen/title/activity based on purpose.
Risks / open questions
- The screen reading is a heuristic. A weird prompt style the rules don't recognize falls back to idle/working instead of blocked, so the detection rules need to be easy to extend per agent (Claude, Codex, generic).
- "Done vs idle" leans on a "have you seen it yet" flag, which is tracked per session.
Summary
What. Give every agent pane a live status (blocked, working, or done) shown right in the sidebar, on the pane tabs, and next to Pane Chat, so you can see what all your agents are doing without opening each one.
Why. When you've got a few agents running, there's no way to tell which one is stuck waiting on you versus still working versus already finished. The current dot is just active/idle, so "needs your approval" and "still thinking" and "done ages ago" all look the same.
How. Read each pane's live terminal screen, its window title, and whether bytes are still flowing, and turn that into blocked / working / idle. A little debounce keeps it from flickering on spinner gaps or startup. Roll the panes up per session (blocked wins, then working, then idle) and color it. A session that finishes while you're looking at something else shows as "done" until you open it. Plain shell panes get no badge.
Visual overview
No mockup yet. Rough idea of the states:
Non-goals
Risks / open questions