I've published a new, general-purpose terminal specification that gives any program a way to tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting, finished, or failed, and why. It is easy to implement on both sides. I've written more about why: https://mitchellh.com/writing/program-status-osc7501
The problem this solves is generic and applies in compelling ways to all sorts of use cases (e.g. package managers, build tools), but it really rears a hideous head when it comes to AI and the "agentic inbox" problem.
I found over 250 different agent orchestrators (with various goals) that all individually implement a heuristic based approach to detecting whether things like Claude Code are working, blocked, done, etc.
If you look at Herdr’s commit history, you can see around 10 compatibility changes to detect Claude Code within just the past 3 months. (This isn't a dig at Herdr! They're doing great work with what they have, and everyone else is doing the same thing).
Heuristics are not the way. And over-indexing on agentic use cases isn't the way, because this problem is really interesting for other tools too: Homebrew, Terraform, Cargo, etc. etc.
Proprietary protocols and out of band APIs are not the way. They have an O(N) integration problem and require extra work to work over SSH or within local VMs/containers.
The program status specification (OSC 7501) solves this in a reliable, deterministic way that is general-purpose and can be easily adopted by the entire industry.
Read more: https://mitchellh.com/writing/program-status-osc7501
