Reading the column

The six lamps

Needs you, done, stopped, working, paused, resting: what each one means, why only one of them blinks, and why rest is a grey ring.

The names are what each state means to you, not to the process. The legend writes them with a capital, and a row's second line, the card and the menu bar's tooltip use the same words.

Needs you

Blinking amber. Claude or Codex is waiting for an answer: a permission, or a dialog an MCP server opened. This is the only state where the work has stopped and you are the reason, so it is the only one that blinks.

Blinking is a scarce signal. Spent on several states it signals nothing at all.

With the helper and answering from the panel turned on, a permission the panel holds opens under its own row, with Allow and Deny. See what it asks for.

Done

Green. The turn finished and produced something nobody has looked at yet.

Green does not mean all is well. It means there is something here you have not seen. Clicking the lamp marks it seen and the row goes back to rest.

It also resists a late event. After a turn closes, a trailing tool event from that same turn can still arrive; without an explicit rule it would drag the lamp back to yellow and the answer underneath would go unnoticed. A new prompt does return it to yellow, because that means you read it and started again.

Stopped

Solid red. A rate limit, an overload, an authentication error. The turn stopped without producing anything, and the right-hand slot says which.

This used to arrive as green, like a completed turn, over a session that had produced nothing at all. It was the most expensive thing the column ever got wrong, because green is the colour you trust enough to leave alone.

It sits below green in the ranking, because a ready answer is consumed at once whereas there is nothing you can do about a rate limit until it expires. It does not resist a restart: if the turn resumes, yellow is the correct information and red would be a leftover.

Red is a turn that failed, and nothing else.

Working

Yellow. Processing, or running tools.

A yellow lamp drawn dashed is a session that has sat on one tool for a quarter of an hour or more: a long build, or a command waiting for input nobody will type. With the helper, its row shows ⌛ and how long, and its card names the tool and its command. Not a seventh colour: a build can honestly take that long, and only you can tell the two apart.

Yellow expires like every other state. Stop does not fire when you interrupt a turn with Esc, and no other event covers it, so before that rule every interruption left a yellow row behind forever. If the expiry gets it wrong the damage is bounded: the next signal recreates the row.

Paused

Soft blue. The turn is over, but something the agent started is still running: a background shell, a monitor on a test run, a subagent. It will wake the session. Nothing for you yet.

Before this state existed, a session that had stopped and was waiting an hour for a build stayed yellow the whole hour, and yellow reads as thinking. The card names what is holding it, which is what makes the remaining honest question askable: is that shell a dev server nobody will ever stop?

It is the one cool hue in a warm palette, on purpose. Everything else here is a shade of attention, and this is the state that asks for none.

Resting

A grey ring. Nothing new.

With a dozen sessions the column spends most of its day like this, so rest has to be quiet: no glow, no fill, an empty place. Until 1.1 it was the failure's red, dimmed, and on the dark panel it read as a broken session — reading a green answer turned its row "red". Now the two cannot be confused, by hue or by shape, and that is why they still read apart in compact mode, where there is no text at all.

A lamp drawn as a hollow ring in a state's own colour is something else: a Claude Code session the helper does not speak for, while other sessions have it. Its colour comes from the connection alone, usually because it started before the helper was installed.

Twelve hours at rest

A row that has rested for twelve hours folds into one line at the foot of the column, in your order: «Resting · 3 — docs-site, search-index, billing-worker». A click lists them under it, one line each.

A project with any session not at rest never folds, and a key bound to a folded row's slot still finds it. The moment one of them does something, it is back in its place.

The order in that table is urgency, not position

The table above runs from most urgent to least. The column does not. Rows keep the order you gave them, and a state lights a row up where it already is. See slots and order.