Yesterday a small open source build landed that fixes a problem anyone running several coding agents will recognize. It’s called Openbar, and it lives in the Mac notch.
The problem: you start a few agents, switch to something else, and one of them quietly stops. It’s waiting on a permission prompt or a question, buried in a terminal tab you haven’t looked at in twenty minutes. The agent is idle and you don’t know it. Nothing flashes and nothing beeps. The session just sits there, and the clock keeps running on a task that could have finished before lunch. If you’ve ever come back to a terminal and found a prompt that has been sitting there since you left, you know exactly how this feels.
What’s new
Openbar puts every Claude Code and Codex session in the notch. You see what each agent is doing and what it’s waiting on, without hunting through tabs. Think of it as a small status board that’s always on screen, in a spot your eyes already pass over a hundred times a day. Instead of cycling through windows to check on each session, you glance up and the state of every agent is right there. Working, waiting, or asking you something.
The twist
You don’t have to go back to the terminal to deal with it. You can do all three of these from where you already are:
- See the diff before you approve anything.
- Approve with ⌘Y or deny with ⌘N from any app.
- Pick answers to the agent’s questions and send replies without switching windows.
The ⌘Y / ⌘N part is what makes it work. You can be in your browser or your editor, a prompt comes up, you glance at the diff, and you hit one shortcut. The agent keeps going and you never left what you were doing.
Here’s a concrete picture. Say you’re writing a doc in the browser while one agent refactors a module and another writes tests. The test agent hits a permission prompt to run a command. Normally you’d notice it ten minutes late, if at all. Here, it surfaces in the notch, you read the change, you hit ⌘Y, and you’re back in your doc before you lost your train of thought. The cost of that interruption drops from “switch context and find the right tab” to “read one thing and press one key.”
It also runs on Mac and Windows, and it’s free and open source.
The mini-workflow
🧭 Start your agents as usual, a few sessions in parallel. Give each one a clearly separate job, like one on the feature, one on tests, one on docs. Agents that touch different files are less likely to step on each other, and it’s easier to judge each diff when you know what that session was asked to do.
🪟 Carry on with your other work. When an agent needs you, it shows up in the notch. Resist the urge to keep checking on them. The whole point is that the notch does the watching for you, so you can spend your attention on the thing only you can do.
🔍 Read the diff first. That’s the part I’d never skip. Approving blind is how a quick yes turns into a messy cleanup. Even a ten second skim catches the obvious stuff: a file you didn’t expect to be touched, a deleted block, a command that reaches further than the task needs.
⌨️ Approve with ⌘Y or deny with ⌘N. If it’s a question instead, pick an answer and send your reply from the same place. When you deny, tell the agent why in a short reply. A one line reason (“don’t touch the config file, only the component”) usually gets a better second attempt than a bare no.
Pro tips
- The more agents you run in parallel, the more this pays off. With one agent, a terminal tab is fine. With four, the idle time adds up. A simple test: if you’ve ever lost a chunk of time to an agent that was waiting on you, you’re the target user.
- Keep reading the diff before you hit ⌘Y. A shortcut makes approving fast, so make a habit of checking what you’re approving. Speed is only a win if the yes is an informed one. If a diff is too big to judge at a glance, that’s your signal to open the terminal and look properly, or to ask the agent to break the work into smaller steps.
- It’s open source, so you can read what it does before you let it near your sessions. Do that with anything that sits between you and your agents. Look at what permissions it asks for on your machine, what it reads from your sessions, and whether it talks to the network. A few minutes of reading is cheap compared to trusting a tool blindly with your codebase.
- Try it on a throwaway project first. Start two sessions on something low stakes, trigger a few prompts on purpose, and get the shortcuts into muscle memory before you rely on them for real work.
I haven’t run it myself yet, so treat this as a find rather than a review. The idea is solid, though. Agents that wait on a human are only as fast as the human’s reaction time, and a notch popup beats a forgotten tab.
The repo is here: https://github.com/MF-DEEV/Openbar
The author asked how many agents you usually run in parallel. I’m curious too. Tell me your number in the comments 👇 If it’s more than two, this one is worth ten minutes of your time!
Openbar: answer Claude Code and Codex prompts from the Mac notch
by u/Significant-Sea-7238 in PromptEngineering