Show HN: Baton - Know which of your AI coding agents needs you

Neil Patel launched Baton, a free open-source macOS menu bar tool that monitors Claude Code and Codex sessions and alerts users when an AI coding agent is waiting for their input. The tool uses FSEvents for instant updates without polling, supports click-to-jump navigation, and provides a live count of sessions needing attention.

A local command center for every AI agent you have in flight. Claude Code sessions and Codex threads, in one glance, so you always know which one needs you right now . As agents do more work unattended, the hard part stops being doing the work and becomes knowing which of your N running things is waiting on a decision . Baton reads the signals your machine already emits zero manual entry and surfaces the one that matters: the 🎽 "the baton's with you" bucket, an agent that ran its leg and handed back to you. That's the thing that's easy to drop when you're looking elsewhere. It lives in your macOS menu bar a relay runner + "N batons for you" ; click for the full picture, click any session to jump straight to it . curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neilkpatel/baton/main/install.sh | bash That clones Baton into ~/.baton , sets up an isolated Python venv the only deps are rumps and the FSEvents binding , and installs a login LaunchAgent. The 🎽 appears in your menu bar immediately, starts at login, and relaunches if it crashes. Prefer to look first? Clone and run the same script from the checkout: git clone https://github.com/neilkpatel/baton.git && cd baton bash install.sh or: bash install.sh --no-autostart Update: re-run the same one-liner. It pulls the latest into ~/.baton and restarts the app. Remove the autostart anytime with bash install.sh --uninstall . Requirements: macOS, Python 3.9+ 3.11+ enables Codex scheduled-automation tracking , and Claude Code and/or Codex. Baton shows whatever it finds; either alone is fine. Menu bar glance: the title is a live count of sessions waiting on you. Always visible, updates in under a second it watches your session files with FSEvents rather than polling, so it's both instant and battery-cheap; it idles until something actually changes . Two agents, one view: the dropdown groups what's waiting by tool Claude Code / Codex , then Working, then Done. Click to jump: click a Claude session and its Terminal.app tab comes to the front; click a Codex thread and it opens in Codex via its codex:// deep link. No more hunting through windows. Accurate "waiting" signals, per tool: Claude Code: a session that's idle with an assistant answer as its last turn = waiting. Codex: mirrors Codex's own unread blue-dot state, so a thread you've already opened doesn't nag you. Click-to-acknowledge: jumping to a waiting session clears it from the count until it produces a new answer, and the session you currently have open in Terminal isn't counted while you're looking at it. The number goes down when you deal with things. Optional hand-off notifications: off by default the menu bar is the calm channel ; one toggle turns on a banner the moment a baton comes back. Recognizable labels: each session is titled by Claude Code's own running summary ai-title , so you know what it's about at a glance. There's also a full HTML dashboard server.py + index.html for the rich multi-tab view. Open it from the dropdown "Open full dashboard →" , or: bash start.sh python3 server.py --port 8787 → http://127.0.0.1:8787 Every source is a collector that normalizes into one track record, so the UI never changes as sources are added: { id, source, title, project, status, lastActive, detail, alive, extras } status ∈ waiting | working | done | idle | scheduled | Source | Read from | Signal | |---|---|---| Claude Code | ~/.claude/sessions/{pid}.json + transcripts | live busy / idle + last turn → working vs waiting-on-you | Codex threads | ~/.codex/session index.jsonl + .codex-global-state.json | unread blue-dot → waiting; rollout transcript → the agent's closing line | Codex automations | ~/.codex/automations/ /automation.toml | scheduled pipelines → next/last run | Claude Code ~/.claude and Codex ~/.codex are separate tools with separate state dirs; Baton reads both independently. Detection is event-driven FSEvents on the session dir with a slow safety-net poll. Single-file collectors + menu bar app in stdlib Python plus rumps for the menu bar and pyobjc-framework-FSEvents for the watcher, in an isolated .venv . The dashboard is dependency-free vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. No build step, no framework. Click-to-jump raises Terminal.app tabs only. If you run Claude Code in iTerm, Ghostty, or another terminal, detection and counts still work fine; clicking a Claude session just can't raise your tab yet it opens the dashboard instead . Codex jumps work regardless, via deep link. Claude Code has no native read/unread flag Codex does, and Baton mirrors it directly . For Claude, "waiting" clears when you view the session's Terminal tab, click it in Baton, or hit "Mark all as seen", and it comes back when the session produces a new answer. macOS only by nature: FSEvents watcher, menu bar app, AppleScript jump. Entirely local and strictly read-only over ~/.claude and ~/.codex : Baton never mutates your session state, and nothing leaves your machine. The live payload contains your real prompts and working directories, so the dashboard server binds to 127.0.0.1 only , never 0.0.0.0 . Captured state state.json is git-ignored; only scrubbed sample data is committed. menubar.py the app · collectors.py the signal readers · server.py + index.html dashboard · install.sh · start.sh · requirements.txt · state.example.json the track contract .