AO Session Monitor

AO Session Monitor Skill

How to check if an AO worker session is active

Claude Code renders the ❯ prompt at the bottom of the tmux pane while the model is thinking above it. Checking only the last 5-6 lines will produce false "idle" reports.

Correct detection method

1. Capture at least 20 lines: tmux capture-pane -t <session> -p -S -20
2. Look for Unicode activity indicators: ✻ ✶ ✳ ✽ ✾ followed by an action word and duration
   • Examples: ✻ Cascading… (5m 34s · ↓ 3.0k tokens · thinking)
   • Examples: ✶ Germinating… (2m 21s · ↓ 1.2k tokens · thought for 7s)
3. Look for tool use in progress: Bash(, Read(, Edit(, Write(, Grep(, Glob(
4. Look for "Running…" — a Bash command is executing

State classification

Indicator	State	Meaning
✻✶✳✽✾ + duration	WORKING	Model is thinking or executing tools
Running… or timeout	WORKING	Shell command in progress
Baked for Xm or Sautéed for Xm	COMPLETED	Finished, went idle
❯ with no activity indicators in 20 lines	IDLE	Actually waiting for input
Press up to edit queued messages	QUEUED	Has pending message from lifecycle-worker
+uncommitted in status bar	HAS WORK	Edited files but hasn't committed/pushed

Common false positives

• ❯ visible = idle: WRONG. The prompt renders below the thinking indicator. Always check 20+ lines.
• No Bash in last 6 lines = not working: WRONG. The model may be in a long thinking phase between commands.
• Session shows old output = dead: WRONG. The model may be mid-thought. Check for activity indicators.

Shell one-liner for monitoring

for s in $(tmux list-sessions 2>/dev/null | grep "ao-[0-9]" | cut -d: -f1); do
  name=${s##*-}
  last=$(tmux capture-pane -t "$s" -p -S -20 2>/dev/null)
  pr=$(echo "$last" | grep -oE "PR: #[0-9]+" | head -1)
  uc=""; echo "$last" | grep -q "uncommitted" && uc="+uc"
  activity=$(echo "$last" | grep -oE "[✻✶✳✽✾] [A-Za-z]+…[^)]*\)" | tail -1)
  if [ -n "$activity" ]; then
    echo "  $name: WORKING $pr $uc ($activity)"
  elif echo "$last" | grep -qE "Baked|Sautéed"; then
    echo "  $name: completed $pr"
  elif echo "$last" | grep -q "queued"; then
    echo "  $name: QUEUED $pr"
  else
    echo "  $name: idle $pr $uc"
  fi
done