Irrlicht

✦ Irrlicht — Menu-Bar Lights for AI Coding Agents (macOS)

🌐 Landing Page · 📖 Documentation · 📦 Latest Release
🟣 working · 🟠 waiting · 🟢 ready · 🔴 error — one ambient dot per session, multi-agent, one-click setup.

Install

Homebrew (recommended):

curl:

DMG: download Irrlicht-.dmg from Releases and drag Irrlicht.app to Applications.

→ Quickstart gets you to your first purple dot in 60 seconds.

What it does

- A menu-bar dot per session — 🟣 working, 🟠 waiting, 🟢 ready, 🔴 error
- Context-pressure gauge — 🟢 → 🟡 → 🔴 → ⚠️ before the auto-compact cliff, so you can /compact while quality is still intact
- Live per-session cost in USD — model-aware via LiteLLM pricing
- History view — spend over time with projection, attribution by project / branch / model, a productive-vs-reverted yield ratio, DORA metrics, and an Activity Matrix of working/waiting/ready/error agent counts per project (macOS app + web dashboard)
- Subagent trees — parent ↔ Explore / Plan / background agents, not just the parent
- Git-aware grouping — sessions clustered by project, branch, worktree
- Real-time —  *In Goethe's Faust, an Irrlicht guides the way through the night. This one guides you through your agents — who's working, who's waiting, and where you're needed next.*

Six concrete pains, every one documented:

- You don't know which session needs you. Claude Code's desktop notifications don't fire inside tmux — the most common multi-session setup.
- Parallel sessions shred your attention. *"The mental gymnastics of context switching wears me out and makes me wonder how well I'm steering each session"* (dev.to).
- Context compaction silently wrecks quality. Auto-compact fires at ~80% of the window, but the model degrades 20–30% before that (MindStudio; GitHub issue with hundreds of…