Lately I run 3 or 4 coding agents in parallel, sometimes more, and I quickly became their babysitter. Constantly jumping between windows just to check who finished, who is stuck, and who is waiting for me to approve something. So I built myself a small tool that tracks all of them and alerts me when someone needs me. It is called The Eye.
Why not use an existing tool?
I tried several existing tools and none fit. They all wrap the entire workflow and force you to work inside them. I prefer to stay in my terminal and my editor.
And as a Tolkien fan, "One Ring to Rule Them All" jumped straight at me, so I did the whole thing in a Lord of the Rings theme. Because why not.
How does it work?
One eye in the macOS menu bar (and a floating window, if you want one) that changes shape by state:
- Red open eye: someone is waiting for you
- Watching eye: everyone is working, go get coffee
- Closed eye: everyone is resting by the campfire
Click a session and the exact window jumps to the front, or it can do that automatically. With a sound, LOTR-style or plain.
The most important design decision
It does not wrap and does not run any agent. The agents stay in their original tools; The Eye only listens.
It listens to lifecycle hooks and writes a small local status file. Nothing leaves your machine. It covers 5 tools: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor (CLI and in-editor), Copilot CLI, and Copilot in VS Code.
Where do you get it?
Free, macOS 14 and up, signed and notarized by Apple. My first Mac app, with more on the way. Instead of playing Ghost of Tsushima over the weekend, this is what came out. Download it at theeye.dev, play with the settings, and tell me what is missing.
The wider point: running agents in parallel is where the productivity is, but only if you solve the attention problem. A human polling windows is the worst scheduler there is. This is the same observability principle I bake into client agent systems: the system tells you when it needs you, never the other way around.
FAQ
How is The Eye different from agent orchestration tools?
It does not wrap or run any agent. The agents stay in their original tools, and The Eye only listens to lifecycle hooks and writes a small local status file. Nothing leaves your machine. Existing tools wanted to own my whole workflow; I wanted to stay in my terminal and editor.
Which coding agents does The Eye support?
At launch it covers five tools: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor in both CLI and editor, Copilot CLI, and Copilot inside VS Code. It is free, requires macOS 14 or newer, and is signed and notarized by Apple.