Agent Island is a free, MIT-licensed desktop status companion for Claude Code and Codex on macOS and Windows. It watches your local sessions and tells you whether each one is running, stopped, or waiting for input.
What it does
Agent Island runs in the background and monitors your Claude Code and Codex sessions locally. When a session needs your attention, it sends a notification. You do not have to keep tabbing back into a terminal to check whether anything happened.
Session data does not leave your machine, there is no account, no cloud sync, and no telemetry to a remote server. For anyone working on proprietary code, that architecture matters more than it might seem, since alternatives in this market have not always been as careful about where session metadata ends up.
The MIT license means the source is open for inspection. You can verify what the app actually does, and if development stops, the code does not disappear.
The problem it solves
Running Claude Code in a single session is manageable. Running three or four concurrently, one refactoring a module, another writing tests, a third handling documentation, is where things fall apart without tooling. Sessions sit idle waiting for input while you assume they are still working.
The distinction Agent Island draws between “waiting for input” and “still running” is the most useful part. Without it, you either interrupt active sessions unnecessarily or leave stalled ones unattended. Notifications fire on state changes, so the app does not need to be in the foreground.
How it compares
AgentsRoom and Happy Coder offer similar session visibility for Claude Code and Codex, but both are mobile-first. Checking on a session means picking up your phone, which is a context switch in the wrong direction when you are mid-code. Claude Code Notifier Companion handles the notification side but focuses narrowly on alerts rather than a persistent status overview.
Agent Island puts session state on your desktop, where your eyes already are. The local-only model is also simpler to defend in environments where routing code-adjacent metadata through third-party servers is not an option.
Who it is for
Developers running one session at a time and staying in the terminal do not need this. If managing multiple concurrent agents is a daily habit, Agent Island addresses that directly without requiring any change to how you work. There is no account to create and nothing to configure beyond installing the app.
Agent Island is available now on GitHub.
- Free and MIT-licensed, no account required
- Session data stays local, nothing uploaded externally
- Distinguishes running, stopped, and waiting-for-input states
- Desktop-native on both macOS and Windows
- Works offline, no dependency on external services
- No Linux support
- Only relevant if you run Claude Code or Codex, no broader agent support mentioned
