Agent controlled status icon

[tperkins-nea]

I don't know if this is even worth adding to Agent Manager as a feature. I just thought I'd share something I use when working with the tool. I have a skill set up so that the agents know to update the title with a status icon to indicate the current stage of work. It's currently in testing and very much depends on the agent properly updating it, so the jury is still out on the usefulness.

If you were to add anything from this I would avoid anything too prescriptive and just add an optional icon placeholder for the title.

Cheers!

[YoanWai]

@tperkins-nea. Thanks. Bot or not, this is a surprisingly good idea from a three week old GitHub account in the era of artificial intelligence. I could use something like it. I had the same need and couldn't come up with an idea. I probably didn't have the time.

Note to myself, or whoever takes this on later. I would leave the title alone. The name should stay the task. I am going to think about a way to show a stage like his, probably without a fixed set of icons.

[tperkins-nea]

Thanks!

Agreed on leaving the title alone. The name should stay the task, and my emoji-in-the-name trick has a side effect anyway: renaming a session also renames its am/ branch, so letter prefixes break MR linkage and only emoji survive the sanitizing.

Building on your "no fixed set of icons" idea, here's what I'd find most useful, keeping it optional and free-form:

• A two-part stage, both optional: an icon (one glyph) and a short label, e.g. agent-manager stage --icon 🔍 --label "in review", plus an MCP equivalent. There's no built-in vocabulary; users' own prompts or skills decide what the icons mean.
• The icon goes at the front, right after the status dot, in a fixed-width slot that never truncates. Long names already get cut off on a narrow sidebar, so anything after the name is the first thing lost, and icons at the front line up into a scannable column. Reserve the slot only when at least one visible session uses it, and pad to two cells, since emoji widths vary between terminals.
• The label goes next to the status (in review · finished · claude), and is the first thing to truncate or hide when space is tight.
• Settable from outside the session too (--session <id>). The weak spot in my trial is relying on agents to remember to update it. If external tools can set it (an MR watcher on "merged", a dashboard on "pipeline failed"), the stage tracks real events instead of agent discipline.
• Nice-to-haves: dim or age a stage that hasn't changed in a while, so stale ones are obvious, and roll the icons up on group headers (cu-1489 · 🔨 4 · 🔍 4 · ✅ 6). That's where it really pays off: one line for a ticket split across 16 sessions, all of which currently just say "finished".

The minimal version (icon + label + setter, icon at the front) would already replace my rename workaround. Happy to test anything you try.

[YoanWai]

@tperkins-nea sorry for the slow reply. I opened #731 to work out where a stage lives, and your list is going straight into it. Setting it from outside the session is the part I hadn't thought of, and it fixes the "agent forgot to update it" problem better than anything I had. Same for the group roll-up, that's where 16 rows all saying "finished" stop telling you anything. The spike leans toward a short word over an icon right now, since emoji widths vary a lot between terminals. Would a word in that slot still work for you, or is the icon column the part you'd miss?