How to run several coding agents at once and know which one needs you

Give each agent its own pane in a named space, and let Spaces watch them. It reads each agent's output to tell working from blocked (waiting for your approval or an answer), done and idle, shows the states in a sidebar, and pops a notice when an agent in another pane stops. You look only when something needs you.

The problem with a pile of terminal tabs

Three agents in three tabs means polling: click through, read the bottom of each, work out whether it is thinking or waiting. The one asking "may I run the tests?" sits idle for ten minutes because it is in the tab you are not looking at.

Spaces and agents

A space is a named, coloured group of panes, usually one per project or task. Each pane runs one agent (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Aider, ForgeCode, Pi), a shell, or any command. Spaces persist: they are still there after you detach, after the client closes, and after a reboot.

npm install -g @jlongo78/agent-spaces

spaces

Then ctrl+k → New space, and ctrl+k → New agent for each agent. Starting an agent offers to resume one of that folder's past sessions where the agent supports it.

Knowing who needs you

The sidebar lists every space and every agent with its state. Sort by priority (ctrl+space o) and the blocked ones float to the top.
A toast appears when an agent in another pane blocks or finishes. Click it to jump there.
The menu (ctrl+k) opens on the agents that need you, most urgent first, with the reason.
The status bar counts blocked and working agents, so a glance at the bottom line tells you whether anything is waiting.

State detection is rule-based and runs locally, reading only what the agents print. Rules are data, update daily from this site, and can be overridden.

Watching two at once

ctrl+space s splits the view so two panes show side by side; tabs hold the rest. The browser view (spaces open) shows a whole space as a grid of terminals on a big screen.

Agents that talk to each other

Each space has a message bus. An agent can post what it finished, ask another agent a question, or ask you to approve something, from inside its own session (spaces-msg in any pane; an MCP server for Claude Code and Codex when collaboration is on). A reviewer agent waiting on a builder agent no longer needs you to copy and paste between them.

Separate folders, separate agents

Two agents editing the same checkout will fight over files. Give each a worktree or a clone, one space per branch, and let the message bus carry the hand-offs. The sidebar shows each space's branch, ahead/behind counts and a dirty marker, so you can see at a glance which one has uncommitted work.

Get started

npm install -g @jlongo78/agent-spaces
spaces

Open source, Apache-2.0, no telemetry. Source on GitHub · every feature.