Blog
Harjas Singh
I was running five Claude Code sessions on a Tuesday afternoon. Auth refactor in one terminal. Test suite in another. Database migration in a tmux pane. Two more sessions exploring different approaches to a caching layer.
I realized I was spending more time managing them than doing actual work. Alt-tab to terminal one — still running. Alt-tab to terminal two — finished, didn't notice. Alt-tab to tmux — waiting for approval. How long had it been waiting? No idea. Switch back to my editor. Where was I?
That was the moment Claude Pulse started.
Look at the top of your MacBook screen. That black pill shape — the notch — is always visible. Every app, every Space, every full-screen window. It's the one piece of screen real estate you can't hide and can't cover.
Most apps treat it as dead space. Some notch apps turn it into a novelty — album art, cute animations, system stats you'll glance at twice and then ignore. Nothing wrong with that. But it's a waste of prime visual real estate.
The notch is visible in your peripheral vision at all times. You don't look at it directly. You notice it the same way you notice a car dashboard — a change in color or shape pulls your attention without requiring focus. That's not dead space. That's the perfect location for ambient status.
The first design principle was simple: Claude Pulse is an ambient instrument, not another window.
I didn't want a floating panel. I didn't want a menu bar dropdown. I didn't want anything you had to click to open or remember to check. Those are all active-attention interfaces. They require you to think "I should check on my sessions" before they provide value.
The notch works differently. It's passive. You notice a change because your peripheral vision is already pointed at the top of the screen. An amber dot where a green one used to be — your brain registers that without conscious effort.
The design language is minimal. Each session gets a single breathing dot:
One dot breathes at a time: the one that matters most. If everything is green, the most recently active session pulses gently. If something is amber, that dot takes priority. Your attention goes exactly where it's needed.
The notch expands on hover to show details. But most of the time, the dots are all you need. Like a watch face, you read the state in under a second and go back to what you were doing.
The session monitoring is the foundation, but the interactions are where it gets useful.
Keyboard-first approvals. Cmd+Y opens the notch from anywhere. Number keys (1-6) select a session. Enter approves. The whole flow is under two seconds without touching the mouse.
Safety-aware batch approval. Safe operations like file reads and grep get batch-approved with one keystroke. Dangerous operations — bash commands with rm, force-push, DROP TABLE — always require individual confirmation. Speed without the risk.
Focus-aware expansion. Claude Pulse knows which terminal tab or tmux pane you're looking at. When you open the notch, the matching session is pre-selected. With six sessions running across three terminals and two tmux layouts, this matters. You don't waste time hunting for the right session.
Deep tmux support. Each tmux pane maps to its own Claude session. Claude Pulse reads pane titles and content to maintain the mapping. Split your terminal however you want — the notch keeps track.
Native macOS notifications. When a session needs approval and you haven't responded in a few seconds, a notification fires with inline Allow/Deny actions. Works across Spaces, works in full-screen, works with Focus mode. Time-sensitive notification category means they punch through Do Not Disturb.
Everything runs locally on your Mac. No cloud servers. No telemetry. No analytics. Session data never leaves your device.
This wasn't a policy decision — it's architectural. Claude Pulse connects directly to Claude Code sessions running on your machine through local IPC. There's no server to send data to even if we wanted to. Authentication tokens live in macOS Keychain. Session state lives in memory and gets discarded when the app closes.
For a tool that sits between you and your AI coding sessions — seeing every command, every file path, every approval — local-only isn't a feature. It's a requirement. There's no universe where session-level developer data should transit through someone else's servers.
We're not the only notch app for Claude Code. The monitoring layer for AI coding sessions is becoming a category. There are half a dozen apps now that can show you session status in the notch.
Where Claude Pulse differs:
Safety-aware batch approval — we're the only app that categorizes tool calls by risk and lets you batch-approve safe ones while requiring manual confirmation for dangerous ones. Everyone else either makes you approve everything individually or lets you approve everything blindly.
Focus detection across six terminals — most competitors support one or two terminals. We map sessions across Terminal.app tabs, iTerm2 splits, and tmux panes simultaneously. The notch always knows what you're looking at.
Zero-cloud architecture — some competitors route session data through their servers for "sync" or "analytics." We don't. Everything is local, always.
Check the changelog for the full feature list and what's shipping next.
I've been using Claude Pulse for a few months now. The thing I notice most is how little I notice it.
The sessions run. I work on other things. Occasionally an amber dot catches my eye, I approve something, and I go back to work. At the end of the day, I've run four to six sessions and managed them with maybe five minutes of total attention.
That's the bar for developer tools in the age of AI coding assistants. You're not doing one thing anymore. You're orchestrating multiple AI agents working across your codebase simultaneously. The tools that manage those agents need to match the paradigm — ambient, passive, and out of your way until the moment they're needed.
The MacBook notch was designed for Face ID. But it turns out it was also designed for this: a persistent, peripheral, always-visible status surface. The best developer tool is one that gives you information without asking for attention. That's what the notch was made for.
More from the workshop
Running Claude Code in tmux means juggling approvals across panes you can't see. Here's why standard notification approaches break down — and how Claude Pulse routes approvals to the right pane by PID.
The first prototype had a login button. I tore it out. Here's why Claude Pulse reads the CLI's existing Keychain credentials instead of asking you to authenticate twice.
Running 3-6 Claude Code sessions? Here's how the context-switching tax kills your flow and what you can do about it.