Agent Session Observability

THE ROW THE DASHBOARD WOULD DRAW

THE RULE STACK, IN THE ORDER IT IS WALKED

The first rule that matches decides the state, so every rule below it is never evaluated. The registry writes its own status field; it is consulted eleventh, because only sessions launched from the CLI write it at all.

1. · 1the process is not alive→ donepid verified alive
2. · 2an unresolved API error inside the last 2 min→ errorno errors recorded
3. · 3a pending AskUserQuestion or ExitPlanMode→ waiting_inputno question or plan waiting on you
4. · 4a pending tool call WITH live child processes→ working1 pending, but no live children
5. · 5a pending tool call older than 10s, no children→ blocked_permissionno tool call has been pending longer than 10s
6. ▸ 6the transcript was written to under 120s ago→ workinglast write 1s ago, inside the 120s window
7. · 7background agents are still writing→ workingnot reached
8. · 8the user has spoken since the assistant stopped→ workingnot reached
9. · 9the last assistant message ended its turn→ waiting_inputnot reached
10. · 10nothing written for over 15 min→ stallednot reached
11. · 11the registry says idle (CLI sessions only)→ idlenot reached
12. · 12a live session with no transcript records at all→ idlenot reached
13. · 13nothing above matched→ idlenot reached

THREE SIGNALS, AND WHAT EACH ONE ALONE WOULD SAY

Every row below is the same estimator, run with only that one signal available. The last row is what the dashboard actually shows.

Point estimate 45m 18s, shown as a band because it is a guess. It is never rendered as a single number.

EQUIVALENT API COST, BY MODEL AND BY RATE CLASS

Nobody was charged this. The machine it runs on is on a flat subscription, so the figure is what the same tokens would have cost on API pricing — and the label says so, everywhere it appears.

One blended rate across those rows would be a different number, and it would look just as authoritative. The model id also arrives with a suffix — a variant tag or a date — so it is resolved by the longest matching table key rather than by an exact lookup, and an id the table has never seen is priced on the fallback and flagged, not dropped.

NAMING A BACKGROUND AGENT

A fan-out spawns agents from one template, so the first line of every prompt is the same shared preamble. Reading line one gives a panel of identical rows at exactly the moment it matters most. The heuristic scans the whole head for what actually distinguishes this agent: a role declaration, then a lane or phase marker, then a markdown heading, and only then line one.

No agent is running at the moment selected above. These three are shown anyway, because the heuristic is the point rather than the timing.

• AGENT 1 — POSTING RULE AUDITOR

  agent-1f4a · reading ledger/posting.ts · running 7m

  ROLE

• LANE 2 — PERIOD BOUNDARY REGRESSION SWEEP

  agent-93b7 · running npx vitest run src/ledger/period · running 5m

  MARKER

• Currency rounding on multi-leg reversals

  agent-c052 · editing ledger/rounding.test.ts · running 11m

  HEADING