Developer Tools on Brian Hengen

I built a terminal that knows when your AI is waiting on you

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:00:00 -0400

If you’ve been doing a lot of agentic development, here’s a situation that probably sounds familiar. You’ve got 5 tabs open, working on 5 different projects, running Claude Code, Codex, maybe OpenCode.

As the coding agents improve, they work for longer, so naturally you multitask, getting another project moving forward while the agents crank away on the others. The problem is that it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on in the other tabs, and you end up clicking through them one-by-one to see where they are and whether they’re waiting on input. Then you come across one that finished whatever you asked four minutes ago and has been sitting there waiting for an answer to its next question. You don’t notice, because every tab looks exactly the same. To make it worse, it’s hard to keep straight which project is running in which tab.

How vibeflow knows what your AI agent is doing

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

vibeflow is an open-source Linux terminal that shows, per tab, whether the program inside is working or waiting on you. This article details how the detection works: the open protocol, the heuristic fallback, and other key components.

A regular terminal emulator renders a grid of characters coming out of a pty. It has no notion of what the program on the other end is doing, which was never a problem because a human was typing every command and already knew. The terminal is essentially modeled after a typewriter, and how often has anyone worked at two typewriters at once, much less five? AI coding agents break that assumption. They run for minutes (for periods getting longer all the time), then stop and wait for input, and from the terminal’s point of view “thinking hard” and “waiting for you” are the same thing: a quiet pty.