Agent Monitor

The Agent Monitor answers one question: what are all my agents doing right now? It lists every live agent session across every registered project - not just the board you have open - in a single surface. Notifications tell you when an agent needs you; the monitor is the surface you look at.

Opening the Monitor

Click the activity icon in the title bar (it is there even before you open a project) or press Ctrl+Shift+M / Cmd+Shift+M. The shortcut is global and rebindable in Settings > Hotkeys. Escape or the close button dismisses the overlay.

The activity icon is a plain surface button, like the Quick Find and Usage Stats icons beside it - it does not change color with agent activity. The icon whose border marches green and holds amber is the neighboring Command Terminal toggle, and that signal covers the current project only.

Caution

While a task detail window, Command Terminal, or conversation window is focused, Ctrl+Shift+M / Cmd+Shift+M maximizes that panel instead - the panel-maximize shortcut shares the combo and wins while a panel has focus. Click the title-bar icon instead, or close the panel first.

When the monitor is popped out into its own window, the icon and the shortcut focus that window rather than opening the in-app overlay.

What It Shows

The monitor is machine-global. Sessions from every registered project appear together, so you never have to switch projects to see a session. It opens showing all of them, and a Projects filter narrows the view when a busy machine gives you more at once than you want. Alongside live sessions it keeps recently finished ones visible for 30 minutes (up to 50), so an agent that just exited doesn’t vanish before you’ve seen its ending.

Command Terminal sessions are included too, listed under their numbered titles with their branch shown in place of a board column. The monitor is the only surface that shows Command Terminals from projects other than the open one - they have no board card to find them by.

With nothing running anywhere, the monitor shows a quiet empty state: “Sessions from every project appear here as soon as an agent starts.” A closed monitor costs nothing - collection and output sampling only run while it is open.

Layouts

Three layouts, switchable from the toolbar:

• Cards (default) - one card per session, reflowing up to five columns as the surface widens. The pop-out lays out by its own window’s width.
• Table - one row per session with sortable columns: state, project, task, column, agent, model, effort, permission mode, runtime, context usage, and what the agent is doing now. Effort, permission, and runtime appear only here.
• List - a dense one-line card per session when you want the most sessions on screen.

A card shows the owning project and column (or branch, for a Command Terminal), an activity pill, the task title and ticket number, a PR link when one is attached, the live output peek, label pills, and the same model and context-usage footer as a board task card.

Summary Tiles

Four tiles across the top count the machine-wide state:

• Idle - agents waiting on a response from you, whether stopped or at a permission prompt. This is the same binary the sidebar dots and board cards use - see Activity Detection.
• Active - agents working right now, with how many projects they span.
• Paused - sessions you suspended, plus any queued waiting for a free slot.
• Projects - projects with at least one live session.

The tiles follow the Projects filter, so a scoped view counts only the projects in view. They ignore the transient slicing below it - Live only and the text filter - and keep counting everything within that scope. The whole strip steps aside when there is nothing to count.

Toolbar: Group, Sort, and Filter

• Group by Project or by Status; grouping is always on. Status groups read Idle / Active / Paused / Recently finished, and rows hold their position within a group rather than reshuffling on every update.
• Sort oldest- or newest-first. In the table layout the sort control hides - click a column header to sort instead.
• Projects scopes the whole view - list and summary tiles alike - to a chosen subset of projects. The pill reads “All projects” until you narrow it, then “2 of 5 projects”. It appears once more than one project has sessions and stays put while you are narrowed, so Clear is always reachable. The scope persists across restarts.
• Live only hides paused and recently finished sessions.
• The filter box matches title, project, column, agent, model, #ticket, and labels. While it is hiding rows, an “N of M” pill shows how much of the machine you’re looking at; the summary tiles keep counting everything in project scope.

Defaults: cards, grouped by project, longest-running first. View preferences persist globally and are shared between the in-app overlay and the pop-out.

Live Output Peek

Each card carries a small well showing the last 4 lines of the session’s rendered terminal output (2 lines when label pills need the space), refreshed at most twice a second and only when the visible text actually changes. The peek strips TUI box-drawing frames so you see text rather than borders, trims very long lines, and always keeps the newest lines.

The well is fixed-height, so cards never resize as output streams. A session that has produced no output shows no well at all.

Opening a Session

Click a card or row and the task’s full detail window opens inside the monitor - the same window the board gives you, with the same drag, snap, tile, and maximize behavior, and the monitor still visible behind it. A task’s detail is only ever open in one place: opening it here takes it from the board, and opening it on the board takes it back.

The same one-place rule covers the terminal. While a task’s detail window is open - on the board, in the monitor, or in the detached pop-out - its terminal lives there, and its tab leaves the bottom panel until the window closes.

Right-click a row for the same context menu as a board card - Copy Task ID, Edit, Changes, Move to, Backlog, Archive, Delete - routed to the row’s own project, plus Open on board, which switches to that project and closes the monitor. A Command Terminal row has no detail window, so clicking it takes you straight to that terminal.

Rows carry no pause or resume controls - the monitor reports a session as Paused, but pausing and resuming happen in the task’s detail window, which you can open right here. See Session Persistence for the states behind the groups.

Pop-Out

The pop-out button detaches the monitor into its own OS window - keep it on a second display while you work the board. The window is global: it survives project switches, and the in-app overlay stays out of the way while it is open (the title-bar icon and Ctrl+Shift+M / Cmd+Shift+M focus the window instead). Detail windows you opened inside the monitor move with it.

Next steps

Next: Notifications - the alerts that pull you back to what the monitor shows.

See also:

• Terminal & Activity Tab - the current project’s bottom panel
• Command Terminal - the sessions only the monitor shows cross-project
• Session Persistence - the session states behind the groups
• Hotkeys - rebind the monitor toggle