How to monitor multiple AI coding agents at once

Why parallel agents are hard to track

Agents work in bursts: minutes of autonomous progress, then a full stop — a permission request, a question, a finished task waiting for review. With one agent you notice. With three agents across six terminal tabs and a couple of tmux panes, the stops go invisible. The result is the worst of both worlds: you're interrupted enough to never focus, checking terminals that don't need you, while agents sit blocked in terminals you aren't checking. The cost isn't compute — it's dead time on both sides of the glass.

What a monitoring setup needs

Whatever tooling you choose, four capabilities decide whether parallel agents actually pay off. One glanceable status surface — who's working, who's waiting, who's done — without cycling through windows. Interruptions only when needed: a signal when an agent blocks, silence when it doesn't. A way back to the exact spot — the right window, tab, or pane, in one action. And per-agent usage visibility, because parallel sessions drain rate-limit windows in parallel too (see how Claude Code limits work).

The DIY approaches (and their limits)

Window discipline. A dedicated Space or monitor per agent works — until you're deep in an editor on another Space and an agent has been waiting eight minutes.

A terminal multiplexer. tmux panes put every agent on one screen, and status bars can show activity. It's the strongest free setup, but it still requires looking: nothing pulls your attention when a specific pane blocks, and the panes compete with the code you're actually writing.

Terminal notifications. Bells and OS notifications fire on completion, but they're binary and noisy — no live status, no sense of which agent, no way to act without switching anyway.

All three share the same gap: they show you terminals, not attention. The question you actually have is "does anything need me right now?" — and none of them answer it at a glance.

The notch approach

Vibe Island turns the notch — the one part of the screen that's visible over every app, every Space, every full-screen editor — into that answer. Every session from 26 supported agents appears with live status: working, waiting for input, or done. When an agent blocks, the panel surfaces it (with a distinct 8-bit sound per event, so you know what happened without looking). For Claude Code, OpenCode, and MiMoCode you can approve permissions and answer questions right in the panel; for everything else, one click jumps to the exact terminal, tab, or split pane — across 20+ terminals, tmux included.

Common questions

The agents it watches

Vibe Island monitors Claude Code, Codex CLI, ZCode, Gemini CLI, Antigravity CLI, Cursor Agent, Trae, OpenCode, MiMoCode, Factory Droid, Qoder, Qwen, Kimi Code, DeepSeek, Mistral Vibe, Copilot, CodeBuddy, WorkBuddy, Kiro, Hermes, Amp, Pi Agent, Oh My Pi, and Gajae Code. in one panel — and tracks their usage limits side by side, so routing work to whoever has headroom is a glance, not a guess. Start with the multi-agent overview or the session tracker pillar.