Menu-bar telemetry for AI coding agents
/ eer-likht / — will-o'-the-wisp — the ghostly light of the Harz mountains
In Goethe's Faust, an Irrlicht guides the way up the Brocken on Walpurgis Night. This one guides you through your agents — who's working, who's waiting, and where you're needed next.
The Light System
Each session is a single light. Its color tells you the truth about where your attention should go.
The agent is thinking, building, calling tools. It doesn't need you yet.
The agent needs your judgment. A question, a permission prompt, a plan to approve.
The path ahead is clear. The session is idle, ready for your next instruction.
Capabilities
Zero configuration. Install, run, and Irrlicht discovers your sessions automatically.
Sub-second state detection via FSEvents and kqueue. See working, waiting, and ready the moment they change.
Track context window utilization across models. Get notified at 80% and 95% before auto-compaction hits.
Per-session and per-project cost tracking based on model pricing and token breakdown. Know what you're spending.
Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and more. Monitors all your AI coding agents from one unified interface.
Detects branch, project name, and worktree context. Sessions grouped by project in the menu bar.
No hooks. No settings. Install the daemon and the app, and it discovers sessions via filesystem watching.
Under the hood
Irrlicht is a deterministic pipeline. Transcript files go in, session states come out. No magic.
Daemon watches .jsonl transcript files via kqueue/FSEvents
Tailer extracts model, tokens, tool state, cost from each event
WebSocket pushes state changes to all connected clients in real time
Menu bar app renders colored session indicators, grouped by project
Compatibility
Monitors the agents you already use, integrates with orchestrators, and runs where you need it.
Get Started
Open Source
MIT licensed. Contributions welcome. Read the docs, file an issue, or submit a pull request.