# Agent center

The agent center gathers your Claude Code and Codex sessions from across every
connection — tmux windows, panes, and raw sessions — onto one page, and lets
you answer their prompts without hunting for the right pane. It's
**experimental** and off by default: enable it in
**settings → experimental → agent center**. Turning it off later does not
uninstall host hooks.

Open it from the sidebar's **agents** entry (on iPhone, behind the sessions
tab's selector — the tab is badged when agents need you), with **⌘⇧A**, or
from the top-bar attention button that appears when agents are waiting. When
an agent is waiting in the focused pane, the
[swipe pad](https://bambouville.com/docs/swipe-pad/#live-agent-options) also surfaces its options as
petals.

## The agents page

Cards are grouped by status — **needs input**, **just finished**, **working**,
**idle**, **status unavailable** — under a summary line
("N agents · N sessions · N hosts") and an "agents need attention / all caught
up" banner.

Each card shows the agent's current prompt. From a card you can:

- press **⇥** to move between cards and **1**–**9** to pick a numbered option,
- **⌘↩ open** — jump straight to that pane,
- type in the message field — "message \<name\>…" queues, "prompt \<name\>…"
  sends immediately,
- interrupt the agent.

Answers re-check the live prompt before being sent, and sends verify
submission — so you never answer a question the agent already moved past.
While an agent streams output in the terminal itself, scrolling is briefly
locked so a stray flick doesn't drag you up mid-run — if you'd rather scroll
freely, **settings → terminal → agent scroll lock** turns the freeze off per
provider (**claude code** and **codex**, both on by default). Detection,
cards, and notifications are unaffected.

![The agents page with cards grouped under needs input, just finished, working, and idle, each card showing provider, session, host, window and pane, plus inline answer buttons and a prompt field.](https://bambouville.com/docs/assets/img/agent-center.png)

*Cards grouped by what needs you first. Blocked agents surface their choices as inline buttons.*


## How detection works

Baseline detection is heuristic, read from terminal text, using the same
grammars as [swipe pad profiles](https://bambouville.com/docs/swipe-pad/#profiles) (built-in Claude Code
and Codex grammars, plus any custom profiles you define).

For **precise status**, Tessera offers an opt-in, per-host **agent status
hook**: a terminal exposes process presence and pixels, but not whether an
agent is computing, idle, or blocked — the agents' own lifecycle hooks are
the authoritative signal. Without it, cards read *status unavailable* and the
center only discovers agents; it never guesses their state.

Installing the hook (from an unavailable card, or the amber top-bar warning)
always shows exactly what it will change first: it places Tessera-owned files
under `~/.config/tessera` on the server, merges only Tessera's handlers into
the Claude Code and Codex user configs — never rewriting your existing
aliases, functions, or unrelated hooks — and adds one guarded sourcing line
to `.zshrc` / `.bashrc` (marked `# TESSERA-AGENT-LIFECYCLE`). What it emits
back is status metadata only — provider, lifecycle event, state, reason,
session/turn identifiers, notification type, permission mode, timestamp, and
local process ID — **never prompts, responses, source code, or credentials**.

Worth knowing after an install:

- A shell has to load it — open a new shell or tmux window (Tessera offers to
  do this at an empty prompt, and only there).
- Codex keeps its own hook-trust boundary: the first integrated launch may
  ask you to review the hook via `/hooks`.
- The page tracks the hook's state per host — not installed, active, inactive
  here, or outdated — repairs a broken integration automatically, and offers
  **update status hook** when a newer version ships. On plain mosh, checking
  may need a key unlock, so Tessera waits for a **check now** tap instead of
  polling.

## Attention notifications

With **agent attention notifications** enabled, Tessera posts an iOS banner —
"\<host\> · \<window\>", "Claude Code needs input", "… just finished" — when an
off-screen agent finishes or needs you while Tessera is backgrounded. Tapping
the banner routes straight to the right pane.

- Enabling this turns terminal-bell background
  [notifications](https://bambouville.com/docs/notifications/) off once; the agent channel is the more
  precise one.
- iOS may suspend longer sessions in the background, so delivery on very
  long-running sessions is best-effort.