Room

Terminal users monitor processes with htop: one live screen answering what is running, what is it doing, what is stuck. The Room is htop for your agents. One cockpit shows every agent in the workspace — who is active, who is idle, which conversations are flowing, and what is waiting for attention — without you cycling through terminal windows to reconstruct the picture.

The delta from a process monitor is that agents are more than processes. A row in htop has a PID and a CPU number; an agent in the Room has a name, standing work, unread mail, and relationships. So the Room shows the things a process table cannot: message bubbles as mesh traffic flows between agents, pending-mail badges on agents that have deliveries waiting for their next prompt, and each agent's place in the workspace's ongoing work.

The Room is also where observation shades into steering. Delegating to an agent is available directly from its context menu in the Room, and starting a team turns your kickoff description into the team's opening channel conversation — visible in the same cockpit as everything else. You act where you watch, rather than observing in one surface and intervening in another.

What problem it solves

Persistent, asynchronous agents create an observability gap that plain CLIs never had. A terminal session only acts while you watch it. NEXUS agents work while you look elsewhere, hold messages for agents that are not running, and coordinate among themselves over the mesh. Without a shared live view, your mental model of the workspace decays the moment you look away — and the failure mode of multi-agent work becomes not bad output but silent work: an agent stuck, a delivery unnoticed, a team waiting on an answer only you can give.

The Room's premise is that a workspace of agents deserves the same at-a-glance observability the process table gave the operating system.

What it replaces

Window-cycling as a monitoring strategy — the tmux wall of panes, alt-tabbing across terminals, the periodic "is anything stuck?" sweep. It also replaces polling with signal: pending-mail badges and live bubbles push state to you, instead of you pulling state out of N scrollbacks.

Honest limits

The Room is a view, not a guarantee. Watching agents does not validate their work — that is the task board's job, with its evidence-gated completion. The Room tells you something is happening, not that it is correct.

It shows this machine only. The Room renders local agents. There is no cloud dashboard aggregating agents across machines, because there is no cloud sync of terminals to aggregate.

Presence is not progress. An active agent can be productively deep in a task or confidently off course; the Room cannot tell the difference. It shortens the time to noticing; judgment about what you notice remains yours.