Vishnu Bharathi

I've published a new, general-purpose terminal specification that gives any program a way to tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting, finished, or failed, and why. It is easy to implement on both sides. I've written more about why: mitchellh.com/writing/progra… The problem this solves is generic and applies in compelling ways to all sorts of use cases (e.g. package managers, build tools), but it really rears a hideous head when it comes to AI and the "agentic inbox" problem. I found over 250 different agent orchestrators (with various goals) that all individually implement a heuristic based approach to detecting whether things like Claude Code are working, blocked, done, etc. If you look at @herdrdev's commit history, you can see around 10 compatibility changes to detect Claude Code within just the past 3 months. (This isn't a dig at Herdr! They're doing great work with what they have, and everyone else is doing the same thing). Heuristics are not the way. And over-indexing on agentic use cases isn't the way, because this problem is really interesting for other tools too: Homebrew, Terraform, Cargo, etc. etc. Proprietary protocols and out of band APIs are not the way. They have an O(N) integration problem and require extra work to work over SSH or within local VMs/containers. The program status specification (OSC 7501) solves this in a reliable, deterministic way that is general-purpose and can be easily adopted by the entire industry. Read more: mitchellh.com/writing/progra…