Roundtable

Watch your Claude Code sessions as an office. Every agent is a person at a desk: they think, run tools, walk over to each other to deliver a result, argue about a verdict, and walk out through the door when they finish. The same events are in a group chat beside the room, in words.

It is read-only. It watches the transcript files Claude Code already writes under ~/.claude and never writes to them, never talks to the API, and never leaves your machine.

See it first

That is fourteen seconds of it. ▶ the whole thing, 52 seconds — no narration, and it carries the parts a loop cannot: the timeline rewinding the room to an earlier second, two sessions in tabs, and the per-agent token and cost breakdown. Captions are burned in, and media/roundtable-trailer.srt has them as text.

Every frame is the real application driven by real events — only the content of the transcripts is synthetic, so that no private session appears in it. scripts/promo/ is the harness that filmed it.

npm install
npm start

That is the whole thing. It opens http://localhost:5173 and starts showing whatever session ran most recently. If you have a session running right now, you are watching it live.

If you don't have Claude Code, or nothing is running

npm run demo

An office with nobody in it is what an idle machine honestly looks like, and it is a poor way to find out what this does. npm run demo writes a synthetic ~/.claude root under your temp directory and points the observer at that instead: agents arrive, work, report to each other, hand down verdicts, fill the desks past the point where there are chairs, and go home — and then it keeps going, so the room is still moving when you come back to it.

Nothing about it is faked except the transcripts. The lines go to disk and come back through the same watcher, parser, normalizer, socket and store as a real session, and the hub's timing is left at its shipped defaults. It never reads your own ~/.claude, so no prompt, path or project name of yours can appear in it. Ctrl+C deletes the staged root on the way out.

The desktop icon

npm run desktop

Puts a Claude Agents shortcut on the Desktop. Clicking it starts the observer if it is not already up, opens the room in your browser, brings Claude Code up to date, and hands the window over to a Claude session — so one click gets you both halves of what you were going to open anyway.

Clicking it twice is safe: the servers are only started when nothing is listening on their ports, so a second click just opens another tab and another session. The servers get their own minimized window called Roundtable servers, which is where to look if something does not come up and what to close when you are finished.

The session starts in your home directory, because that is where sessions normally run and so it is the one the observer opens on. $StartIn at the top of desktop\claude-agents.ps1 changes that. desktop\claude-agents.ps1 -SkipClaude does everything except open the session, which is how to check the shortcut without spending one.

The icon is drawn by scripts/desktopIcon.mjs rather than checked in as an opaque binary — edit the geometry there and re-run npm run desktop. If you move or rename the project, re-run it too: the shortcut points into the checkout.

What you are looking at

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────┐
│ ROUNDTABLE  ▾ session   ● LIVE      TOK  EST  AGENTS  ⟲ ⌘K ◐ ▤        │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────┤
│                                                          │  CHAT        │
│   the office — one person per agent                      │  AGENTS      │
│                                                          │  TOOLS       │
│   ┌─────────┐                                            │              │
│   │ AGENTS  │  roster rail: who is here, what they are   │  the same    │
│   │  ·····  │  doing, how many tokens they have spent    │  events, in  │
│   └─────────┘                                            │  words       │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────┤
│ ELAPSED  ▁▃▅▂▇▃▁▂▅▃▁  activity, one bar per second — click to rewind     │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The room. Each agent walks in through the door and takes a desk. Working at a desk means a tool is running; a thought bubble is a real thinking block; walking to someone and speaking is that agent reporting a result. A red bubble is a REFUTED verdict, a green one CONFIRMED. When an agent finishes it gives up its chair — so somebody waiting outside can have it — walks to the door and leaves. So the room is always only the people still working, and the desks that are free are free because somebody actually finished. Whoever has left is still in the AGENTS panel with their tokens, their cost and everything they said.

If one of them turns out not to have finished after all — which happens, because a background agent is reported done the moment it is launched — it walks back in through the door and takes a desk again.

If more agents are running than the room has chairs, the extra ones appear as small heads along the bottom. They are real: you can hover, tab to and click them.

The top bar. TOK is every token the session has billed, cache included. EST is a cost estimate from published list prices — a ≥ in front means some model in the session has no rate card in shared/models.ts, so the figure is a floor rather than a total.

The timeline. One bar per second of the session. Click one — or tab to it and use the arrow keys — and the whole room rewinds to that moment and stops. The office is deterministic, so this rebuilds the room as it actually stood, not an approximation. Press Escape or the RESUME LIVE button in the top bar to come back to now.

More than one session at a time

When two or more sessions are running, a strip of tabs appears over the room, one per session. Clicking a tab shows that session's room, roster, feed and totals. Nothing is thrown away when you switch: every room keeps running in the background, so switching back is instant and complete.

"Running" is the same thing the dot in the picker means — the CLI has the session registered and something touched it inside the last 90 seconds. A tab carries a count only when that session has agents actually working, so a busy session and an idle one are still told apart at a glance. With one session running, or none, there is no strip at all; there would be nothing to choose between.

New sessions are picked up automatically. The hub sweeps for them every few seconds — start a session in another window and its tab appears on its own. The ⟲ button in the top bar asks it to look now rather than on its own schedule; it is there so you do not have to wonder whether it is working.

To watch a session that is not running — anything you have ever run on this machine — use the session picker in the top bar, or press ⌘K and start typing its name.

Keys

Clicking a person focuses them: the feed filters to their turns and everyone outside their spawn tree dims. Clicking the whiteboard opens the session's feed; clicking the roundtable filters the feed to just the verdicts agents gave each other.

If something looks wrong

OFFLINE in the top bar. The hub is not running. npm start runs both halves; if you started only Vite, the page has nothing to connect to.

"port 7411 is already in use". Roundtable is already running in another terminal. Open http://localhost:5173 instead of starting a second copy.

Vite refuses to start because 5173 is busy. That is deliberate. The hub only accepts WebSocket connections from localhost:5173 and :4173 — that check is the only thing stopping any other page you have open from reading your transcripts. If Vite quietly moved to 5174 the app would look completely normal and never connect.

The feed says lines were dropped, or that the tail is incomplete. Both are true statements, not glitches: a transcript line over 1 MiB cannot be parsed and is stepped over (any tool call answered on such a line will never show a result), and a very large transcript is still being read. The feed says so rather than quietly showing you less than there is.

Development

npm run dev          # same as start, without opening a browser
npm test             # 376 unit tests
npx tsc --noEmit     # types
npm run e2e          # Playwright — needs 7411 and 5173 free, so stop `npm start` first
npm run room         # render the office to .preview/room-{day,night,spawn}.png
npm run room:bless   # accept a deliberate visual change as the new baseline

npm run e2e starts its own hub on 7411, so it cannot run at the same time as the app. Stop the app by port, not by killing the npm wrapper — the two servers outlive it.

Architecture, in one paragraph: server/tail.ts tails each JSONL file by byte offset → server/parse.ts tolerantly parses a line → server/normalize.ts turns it into typed events → server/hub.ts watches the filesystem, derives cross-file events like "that subagent finished", and broadcasts over a loopback WebSocket gated on Origin → src/ws.ts batches frames → src/store.ts folds them into one RtState per session → the panels render that, while src/office/mapping.ts turns the same events into commands for the deterministic simulation in src/office/engine.ts, which src/office/pixel/scene.ts paints into a 480×270 buffer. shared/ holds the wire types and is the only thing both halves import.

docs/pixel-contract.md is binding for anything under src/office/pixel/.