Silicon Workers is a free macOS menu bar app that watches every Claude Code and Codex session for you. Five sessions, two runs, one brain β know in 3 seconds who's waiting, which one is urgent, and what to do next.
Free Β· Local-first Β· Your data never leaves your Mac
AI coding agents turned everyone into a multi-threaded manager. But the tooling is still single-threaded β you're managing a fleet with Cmd-Tab and memory.
Did it finish yet?You switch over β it finished 20 minutes ago and has been idling, waiting for you.
Which window wanted approval?Three terminals, two desktop apps. You check them one by one to find it.
Which one do I look at first?Everything looks unread, but only one is actually blocked on your decision.
AI pauses for approval exactly when you're looking at another window. Real blockers push a macOS notification β plain words, one ping per wait.
A running session with no activity for 30 minutes turns its card orange and pings you once. No more "it stalled at 2pm and I found out at 6".
Three sessions on the same project? They fold into one card, and the loudest signal decides where it sits. Quiet lines collapse out of your way.
The top of the panel holds exactly one focus card: the task that needs you most. Approvals first, then whoever has waited longest. Open the panel β the first thing you see is the answer.
"Needs your approval" means the agent is truly stuck β solid orange, counted on the menu bar badge. "Finished, take a look" can wait β soft orange, no badge. If it made the badge, it's worth stopping for.
Claude Code reports through official hooks, every event. Codex reports each turn via notify. Anything else, register by hand. Each project gets its own color β mixed fleets stay legible.
Silicon Workers isn't a project management suite. It's a lightweight tool for one person driving several AI tasks at once. No years of coding required β if you use Claude Code or Codex on a Mac and tend to run more than one thing, it saves you the window-checking.
Three tiny workers appear in your menu bar. No Dock icon, no Cmd-Tab entry β quiet enough to forget.
Click "Connect" at the top of the panel β Claude Code and Codex event capture installs itself. It only writes a log, never changes behavior, and uninstalls cleanly.
Open that fifth session guilt-free. When someone's waiting on you, the badge counts it β click and you know who's first.
No server, no account, no telemetry. Event capture appends one line of JSON to a local file; Silicon Workers assembles the state on your machine. Uninstalling means deleting two lines of config.
Yes. Installing and using Silicon Workers takes no coding β one click sets up the config. It isn't a replacement for Claude Code or Codex, though: you need at least one of them on your Mac first.
No. Silicon Workers watches, never touches β its hooks produce zero output to Claude Code, so approval prompts reach you exactly as before. Its only job is to tell you when one is waiting.
Close, but honestly no. There's no universal "the AI is waiting for input" event β only approval requests are precise. Killed terminals are caught by timeouts. Our principle: better to nudge you once too often than pretend to be omniscient.
Not yet. V1 covers Claude Code (all events) and Codex (turn completion); anything else can be registered manually. Plain ChatGPT or Claude web chats don't go through this mechanism and won't appear in the panel.
No. Task state is assembled locally on your Mac; code and conversations are never uploaded or modified. There's no server that could receive them anyway.
Free during beta. The core will stay free.
Let the AI keep working. Save your attention for the calls only you can make.
Download Beta (macOS 14+)