Why Your AI Coding Assistants Need a Spotlight: Meet Baton

If you've been riding the AI-assisted development wave, you've probably noticed something: AI agents are everywhere, but they're not always easy to track.

You've got Claude Code running in one terminal. Maybe Codex handling a refactor in another. Perhaps Cursor or Continue.dev sessions peppered across your workflow. Before you know it, you're hunting through tabs, windows, and processes just to remember where that critical conversation is happening.

This is the problem Baton aims to solve — and honestly, it's solving a problem we didn't realize we had until it became unbearable.

The Visibility Problem with AI Agents

Here's the thing about AI coding assistants: they operate in parallel with your workflow, often running in the background while you context-switch between tasks. Unlike traditional IDE windows that sit prominently in your Dock, these agents live in terminals, background processes, or browser tabs you forgot you opened.

The result? Context fragmentation.

You're mid-sprint on a feature when you remember you asked Claude Code to handle some boilerplate two hours ago. Did it finish? Did it hit an error? You open your terminal, and... nothing. Or you find it, but you've lost your train of thought entirely.

Baton addresses this by creating a single, always-accessible dashboard right in your macOS menu bar.

How Baton Works

Think of Baton as a mission control center for your AI agents. Once installed, it monitors active Claude Code and Codex sessions and displays their status directly in your menu bar.

What you get:

• Real-time session visibility — Know instantly which agents are running, idle, or waiting for input
• One-click navigation — Jump directly to any active session with a single click
• Background monitoring — Keep tabs on long-running tasks without constantly switching windows

The interface is minimal by design. You don't need another window to manage. The information lives where your attention already goes — the menu bar.

Why This Matters for Developer Productivity

We've seen incredible tools emerge for AI-assisted coding, but observability has lagged behind capability. When your AI agents are invisible, you lose the benefits of asynchronous collaboration that makes them so powerful in the first place.

Tools like Baton represent a broader trend: treating AI agents as first-class citizens in our development environments. They're not just helpers hiding in terminals — they're collaborators that deserve proper context, tracking, and management.

For teams running multiple AI agents simultaneously (increasingly common as these tools specialize), this kind of visibility isn't a luxury. It's essential for maintaining sanity.

Getting Started

Baton is open-source and available on GitHub. Installation is straightforward for macOS users, and the project welcomes contributions from developers interested in extending support to other AI agents or platforms.

If you're deep in the AI-assisted development ecosystem, give it a try. Your future self — the one who no longer has to dig through five terminal windows to find that Claude session — will thank you.

The bottom line: As AI agents become integral to how we build software, our tooling needs to evolve to match. Baton is a small but meaningful step toward making that happen.

What AI agent workflows are you struggling to keep track of? The conversation around developer tooling for AI collaboration is just getting started.