If you spend your days juggling multiple Claude Code sessions, you've probably felt that particular brand of frustration when one of them sits idle for ten minutes—waiting on a permission prompt while you're debugging something completely different across the other window. A new open-source project called AI Pulse tackles exactly this problem with a surprisingly clever hack: a fake LED strip rendered right beside your macOS Dock.

The Problem With Parallel Agents

The developer behind AI Pulse explains they run several Claude Code instances in parallel and found themselves constantly cmd-tabbing between windows just to check if any had stalled out on authorization dialogs. It's the kind of friction that breaks flow state—you're deep in one task when a notification somewhere else demands your attention, or worse, you don't notice there's a stuck prompt until twenty minutes later. Rather than waiting for their SidePulse.io hardware shipment (a physical LED indicator strip), they built the software equivalent themselves. AI Pulse renders as a thin visual element positioned next to the Dock, using color and animation to communicate each running agent's current state without requiring you to switch focus away from what you're working on.

How It Works

The project lives at github.com/leog/ai-pulse for anyone who wants to dig into the implementation. The approach is pure software—no additional hardware required—just clever use of macOS APIs to detect when your AI coding assistants are actively running, waiting for input, or blocked on system prompts that need human intervention.

Key Takeaways

  • Solves the 'which agent is stuck' visibility problem without extra monitors or hardware
  • Runs entirely in software as a Dock-adjacent visual indicator
  • Open source and available now on GitHub
  • Inspired by SidePulse.io but implemented purely in code

The Bottom Line

This is exactly the kind of tooling the AI coding workflow needs more of—we're still in the early days of figuring out how to monitor agents that work asynchronously, and simple visual status indicators beat constantly tabbing through terminal windows. If you're running parallel Claude Code sessions, this one belongs in your setup.