Command Central

The VS Code agent control tower. Monitor all your AI coding agents from one sidebar — even ones running in external terminals that VS Code can't see.

The Problem

You're running 3 Claude Code agents in terminal tabs, a Codex session in tmux, and you've lost track of which one finished, which one failed, and which one is still burning tokens. You Cmd+Tab between 6 windows trying to find the right terminal. Sound familiar?

The Solution

Command Central puts every agent — regardless of which terminal app they're running in — into a single VS Code sidebar. One glance tells you what's running, what's done, and what needs attention.

Features

🤖 Agent Status Sidebar

• Live status monitoring — See running, completed, and failed agents at a glance
• Click to focus — Jump to any agent's terminal with one click
• Auto-refresh — Status updates every 5 seconds while agents are running (configurable)
• Git context — See the branch and last commit for each agent
• Per-project emoji icons — Visually distinguish agents across projects

📊 Agent Dashboard (Cmd+Shift+D)

• Full agent overview in a webview panel
• Running, completed, and failed counts
• Quick actions per agent

🔔 Notifications

• Completion alerts — Get notified when any agent finishes
• Failure alerts — Immediate notification on agent errors
• Granular control — Toggle completion, failure, and sound notifications independently
• Status bar badge — Running agent count always visible

📋 Activity Timeline

• History of agent events across sessions
• Configurable lookback window (default: 7 days)

📂 Git Sort (Agent Diff Tracker)

• Time-sorted file changes — Most recently modified files at the top
• Multi-project support — Up to 10 project slots for multi-root workspaces
• Extension filter — Filter by file type (.ts, .py, .md, etc.)
• Status grouping — Group by staged/unstaged with time-based subgroups
• Full context menu — Open diff, copy path, reveal in explorer, compare files

⚡ Agent Controls

• Launch agents from the sidebar (with Ghostty Launcher)
• Kill running agents directly from VS Code
• View agent diffs — See what files an agent changed
• Open agent directory — Jump to the agent's working directory
• Capture output — Stream agent stdout to an Output Channel

Quick Start

1. Install

From the VS Code Marketplace, or:

code --install-extension oste.command-central

2. Open a Project

Open any folder with a Git repository. The Command Central icon appears in the Activity Bar.

3. Monitor Agents

Command Central auto-detects your task registry from standard locations:

Or set a custom path: Settings → Command Central: Agent Tasks File

How It Works

Command Central reads a tasks.json registry file that tracks agent sessions. Any tool that writes to this format gets full sidebar integration.

// Example tasks.json entry
{
  "version": 2,
  "tasks": {
    "agent-myproject-planner": {
      "status": "running",           // running | completed | failed | stopped
      "project": "my-project",
      "startedAt": "2026-03-22T21:00:00Z",
      "cwd": "/Users/you/projects/my-project",
      "command": "claude --print 'Implement auth module'"
    }
  }
}

Works With

Coming soon (v0.5.0): Auto-discovery of Claude Code processes running in any terminal — no configuration needed. This is the feature that makes Command Central unique: VS Code's native Agent Sessions View only sees agents it spawned. Command Central will see all of them.

Keyboard Shortcuts

When sidebar is focused: | Key | Action | |-----|--------| | F | Filter files by extension | | G | Toggle grouping panel |

Configuration

All settings are under commandCentral.* in VS Code Settings (Cmd+,).

Agent Monitoring

Git Sort

Display

Requirements

• VS Code 1.100.0+ (or compatible: Cursor, Windsurf, etc.)
• Git — for Git Sort features
• Node 18+ — runtime requirement

Optional

• Ghostty Launcher — for full agent lifecycle management (launch, auto-track, hooks, notifications). Without it, you can still monitor any agent that writes to tasks.json.

Roadmap

See ROADMAP.md for the full plan and CHANGELOG.md for release history.

Telemetry

Command Central collects anonymous usage data to improve the extension. We track:

• Extension activation and feature usage counts
• VS Code version, OS, extension version

We do NOT collect: file names, repository names, code content, or any personal data.

Disable via: Settings → Command Central → Telemetry: Enabled (uncheck), or set VS Code's telemetry.telemetryLevel to off.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, testing, and PR guidelines.

# Clone and install
git clone https://github.com/ostehost/command-central.git
cd command-central
bun install

# Run tests (674 tests, 1402 assertions)
bun test

# Build VSIX
just dist

License

MIT — Free and open source. Always.

Stop managing terminals. Start managing agents.