Two agents working. One glance.
Kick off a task in one window, switch to the next, then go do your own thing. The moment a light turns green, you know exactly which agent is ready for you — no tab-hunting. This plays automatically; it's the real behavior.
Three colors. Zero ambiguity.
Your turn. The agent finished cleanly and is waiting for your input.
Working. The agent is thinking or running tools — go grab a coffee.
Needs attention. The last turn ended with an error.
Idle. No recent agent activity recorded for that window.
Tiny app. Big focus.
It does one thing perfectly: tells you when to look at your agent — and when you can ignore it.
Menu bar + floating lights
A colored dot lives in your menu bar, plus optional always-on-top traffic lights you can drag anywhere on screen.
One light per window
Running agents in five windows at once? Get five lights — or switch to a single combined light. Your call.
Cursor & Claude Code
Hooks into both tools. Auto-installs on first launch — works the moment your agent starts a turn.
Resizable, your way
Scale the lights from subtle to impossible-to-miss, toggle labels, and pick combined or per-window layout.
Completely local
State lives in a small JSON file on your Mac. No servers, no accounts, no telemetry. Nothing leaves your machine.
It listens — it never interferes.
AgentLights installs lightweight, observe-only hooks. They record state to a local file and never block, deny, or rewrite anything your agent does.
Agent hooks
A hooks.json entry maps Cursor's turn events — submit, tool use, stop — to a tiny shell script that writes the current state per conversation.
settings.json hooks
The same script wires into Claude Code's lifecycle events. If ~/.claude exists, AgentLights sets it up automatically.
Up and running in a minute.
Download the app
Grab AgentLights.dmg for macOS.
Drag to Applications
Open the .dmg and drop AgentLights into your Applications folder.
Open it
Launch it — look for the colored dot in your menu bar. No Dock icon.
Start an agent
Hooks auto-install. Kick off a turn and watch it glow.
Your agents. Your machine.
AgentLights watches local hook events and writes a small status file on your Mac. There are no accounts, no API keys, and no network calls — nothing ever leaves your computer.