The trouble started when one agent stopped being enough. I’d have Claude Code working on the app in one terminal and Codex fixing something on the website in another, each on its own branch, each happily doing its own thing. Then it was three. Then four. And at some point I noticed that I wasn’t really writing code anymore, and I wasn’t really reviewing it either. I was clicking between terminal tabs to find out who was stuck, who was waiting for me to approve a command, and who was about to change the same file as someone else. The agents had gotten faster. I had become the slow part.

That’s a strange thing to realize about your own workflow. The tools were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, and the work still felt harder than it should have. What I was missing wasn’t a better agent. It was a way to see all of them at once without hunting for them.

So I started looking for a place to put that view, and the obvious answers all felt wrong. Another window is just one more thing to lose behind other windows. A dashboard in the browser is something you have to remember to open, which means you open it after something has already gone wrong. I wanted something I would see without trying, the way you notice the time in the corner of your screen without ever deciding to look at it.

That’s how I ended up at the notch. It’s the one part of a Mac screen that’s always in the same place, that your eyes pass constantly, and that nobody uses for anything. Aria lives there now. When nothing needs you, it’s a small orb that stays out of the way. When an agent is waiting on you, the orb tells you, and the panel that opens out of the notch shows you exactly who and why.

I’m building Aria mostly by myself, between school and research at Cal Poly, with the same agents it’s meant to manage running beside me the whole time. That loop is honestly the best part. Every rough edge I hit in my own day becomes something to fix the next morning, and I’m the first user of every change before anyone else sees it.

This page is where I’ll write about all of it: what ships, what breaks, what I got wrong the first time, and whatever I happen to be thinking about while I build. If you’re trying the beta, or just curious, I’d really like to hear from you. You can email me any time.

As for what you’ll actually get, the heart of Aria is a live view of every agent session you have running, right up in the notch. Each one shows what it’s doing at that moment, so you can tell at a glance whether things are moving or whether something has quietly stalled. When Claude Code or Codex needs permission to run a command, you can approve or deny it straight from the panel instead of digging through terminals to find the one that’s asking. And if you want to nudge an agent in a different direction, you can type to it in plain words from the same place.

The part I’m most excited about is teams. If the people you work with run agents too, Aria shows theirs alongside yours, and it warns you when two agents are about to touch the same files before they collide. That was the moment that convinced me this needed to be multiplayer and not just a personal tool.

Through all of it, your prompts, code, and diffs stay on your Mac. Sharing with a team is something you turn on, not something that happens by default.

There are limits, and I’d rather name them than have you find them. Approvals work with Claude Code and Codex only for now. Aria runs on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later. Anything rough that I know about goes on the known issues page, and I keep it current. Pricing after the beta is on the pricing page, but for now, it’s free.

Moving into the notch fixed almost all of that at once. The notch is always in the same spot, it’s already dead space, and your eyes cross it dozens of times an hour without you noticing. When Aria is collapsed, it’s just a small orb sitting beside it. When an agent needs you, the orb changes, and that’s usually enough to pull your eye up for half a second. Hover or click, and a black panel slides out of the notch with your sessions inside.

Getting that panel right took longer than I expected, and most of the time went into removing things. My early versions tried to show everything: logs, diffs, timelines, a little history of every step each agent had taken. It was basically a full dashboard squeezed into a space the size of a sticky note, and it was exhausting to look at. The version that finally felt right shows much less. Who’s running, who’s waiting on you, and one clear thing you can do about each. Everything else is a click deeper, there when you want it and out of the way when you don’t.

Somewhere in that process, three rules settled in that I now check every screen against. The first is to be calm by default. Only the orb is allowed to glow, and everything else stays quiet until something actually needs you. The second is to be real, not staged. Aria shows real agent names, real commands, and real file names, never a polished fake version of what’s happening. The third is to stay local first, so nothing leaves your Mac unless you decide it should.

None of those rules came from a plan. They came from building the wrong thing a few times and noticing what bothered me about it. I suspect that’s how most of Aria will keep getting made, and I’ll keep writing about it here as it does.

If you’ve ever had Claude Code running in one terminal and Codex in another and lost track of which one was sitting there waiting for an approval, you already know the problem Aria is trying to solve. Agents have gotten good enough that running several at once is normal now. The hard part has quietly shifted from getting them to do the work to keeping track of all of them while they do it.

Aria also works for teams. When the people you work with run agents too, you can see theirs next to yours, and Aria will tell you when two of them are heading for the same files before they step on each other. It’s a small thing until the first time it saves you an afternoon of untangling a merge.

It’s worth saying what Aria isn’t. It isn’t another agent, and it isn’t an editor. It doesn’t write your code for you. It just helps you keep an eye on the things that do, from a corner of your screen you were never using anyway.

If that sounds useful, you can see what Aria does or join the beta. I’ll be writing here as it grows.