Why I’m building Aria

I didn’t set out to build a tool for managing AI agents. I set out to build things, and the agents were how I built them. For a while that was the whole story. I’d open a terminal, hand Claude Code a task, and watch it work through it while I read along. It felt a lot like pair programming with someone who never got tired and typed faster than I could think. When it finished, I’d read the diff, poke at it, and move on to the next thing.

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.