Agent Watch for Claude Code

See your Claude Code subagents working in real time — right inside VSCode, with no external server.

When Claude Code fans out work to parallel subagents (Explore, Plan, code-reviewer, general-purpose…), they normally run invisibly. Agent Watch gives you a live dashboard in the sidebar: one card per agent showing its type, task description, status, and a ticking elapsed timer.

Features

• 🟢 Live cards for every subagent the moment it spawns — pulsing while running, gray when done
• ⏱️ Elapsed time updated every 500 ms
• 🧵 Parallel agents shown side by side as they run concurrently
• 📜 Session history of completed agents, with one-click clear
• 🪶 Zero infrastructure — no server, no localhost port, no background process. Just a tiny hook script and a local JSONL file
• 🌍 Works in any project — hooks are global, so every Claude Code session is monitored no matter which folder it runs in

How it works

~/.claude/settings.json        ← Agent Watch registers PreToolUse/PostToolUse hooks (matcher "Agent|Task")
~/.claude/agent-watch-hook.js  ← tiny helper appends one JSON line per agent start/finish
~/.claude/agent-events.jsonl   ← the extension tails this file and renders the panel

On first activation the extension asks for permission to register the hooks. It backs up your settings.json to settings.json.agent-watch-backup before touching it, and only ever appends its own two entries — your existing settings are preserved.

The hook helper is deliberately paranoid: it never writes to stdout, never exits non-zero, and never blocks or breaks Claude Code, even if something goes wrong.

Requirements

• Claude Code installed and used on this machine
• Node.js available on your PATH (the hook helper runs with node)

Commands

Privacy

Everything stays on your machine. The hook records only the agent type, the one-line task description, the session id, and the working directory into ~/.claude/agent-events.jsonl (capped at ~1 MB with automatic rotation). Nothing is sent anywhere.

Uninstalling

Run Agent Watch: Uninstall Claude Code Hooks before removing the extension to clean up ~/.claude/settings.json. If you forget, the leftover hooks fail silently and never affect Claude Code — you can also delete the two agent-watch-hook.js entries by hand.

License

MIT