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What LampBoard is
A column of lamps that floats over your Mac, one per project, so you stop opening windows to find out what your agents are doing.
You are running several agent sessions at once. Some are writing code, some are drafting a report, some are comparing quotes for a document nobody has read yet. One of them has stopped and is waiting for you to answer a question, and from the outside it looks exactly like the ones that are still working.
There is no notification for that. No badge, no sound, no list. The only way to find out is to open windows until you hit the right one, and every window that comes back with nothing costs you the thought you were holding.
LampBoard turns that around. It watches the sessions themselves and shows one lamp per project, always in the same place, floating above whatever you are doing. When a session is blocked on you, its lamp blinks. You click it and you are in that window.
What it watches
Claude Code and Codex, wherever they run on this Mac: inside VS Code, in a terminal, in the Claude desktop app. It also picks up sessions running on another machine over ssh, once you have added that machine.
Each row is a project, not a session. If a project has two agents working in it, one Claude Code and one Codex, the row shows the more urgent of the two and opens to show both.
Above the rows, a bar counts what waits — «1 needs you · 2 to read · 1 stopped» — and searches everything with ⌘K. The first launch walks you through the rest in a minute.
The panel is dark, whatever your Mac is set to
Six lamps and a ring read against a dark ground, which is what they were drawn and measured against. Following a light system would mean a second palette — different hues, a glow that survives on white — kept true alongside the first, and half of what the panel is made of assumes the dark one.
So it stays dark, the way a dashboard does whatever the weather outside. Settings, the legend and the Hub are ordinary windows and follow your Mac like everything else.
What it does not do
It never answers a question for you. The hooks that decide a permission stay unregistered, on purpose, so a bug in this panel can never approve a command you did not see. With the helper and a switch you turn on yourself, a permission can open under its own row with Allow and Deny, and only your click or key answers it. Writing to a session works the same way: off until you turn it on, and only ever what you typed.
Nothing leaves your Mac unless you ask. The panel's own server listens on 127.0.0.1 and nothing else; what can go out — the update check, usage left, LampMaster — waits for you to ask or to switch it on.
Two things a session list cannot tell you
The first is how much room is left. Every session has a context budget, and the ring beside each lamp shows how much of it is spent. It decides something ordinary and constant: whether to start the next big task here or in a fresh session.
The second is whether a turn that ended is actually finished. A turn can hand control back while three background agents keep working for another forty minutes. Anything built on the "turn finished" event calls that done. LampBoard shows it as paused, and names what is holding it.