How status works

Slate reads a session's state from its transcript, who spoke last, and whether a running CLI process vouches for it. This guide gives the signals, the blind spots and how the list stays current.

How a state is decided#

• A quiet transcript with no live process is a closed conversation. It leaves the tab and is never shown as Needs you.
• A process vouches for a session of its tool in the folder it works in (for codex --cd <folder> or cursor-agent --workspace <folder>, that folder). A session that moved on is still found by the folder it began in. Two spellings of one folder (/tmp, /private/tmp) count as one.
• A tool that lists its own sessions decides: an unlisted session is gone, but a listing alone does not prove one alive. A job the tool reports as done, stopped or failed is finished. The one exception is a widget's chat: Claude Code reports its session done after each turn while the session waits for the next message, so there done ends it only once its process is gone.

A turn's last write is what touches the transcript, so a session that just asked you something reads as Working for a 45-second window. For Claude Code the window and the row's time come from the last turn, not the file: Claude Code keeps adding bookkeeping lines (cost, artifact monitors, queued messages) to a transcript long after a turn, and those do not count. A session that ended is still dated by its last write. Three signals shorten the window:

• The window title of a session Slate hosts. If it stops moving, the session becomes Needs you in about ten seconds. Only a title seen to move counts; of the first five CLIs only Codex animates its title.
• The tool's own listing, when it reports the session busy.
• A sub-agent still writing. This reaches a session in somebody else's terminal.

For Claude Code the transcript settles it: a record with a tool call is mid-turn, one with only text is finished. A call with no result is Working, with three exceptions that read Needs you: a question to you (AskUserQuestion) once the 45-second window has passed; any call quiet for more than 30 minutes, which is a prompt nobody answered (a foreground command ends at its 10-minute timeout and writes a result); and, in a session Slate hosts, a quiet call whose terminal has drawn nothing (asking you to allow it). A moving title, the tool reporting busy, or a sub-agent still writing keeps it Working.

Blind spots#

• A permission prompt in a session Slate neither hosts nor can ask reads as Working for Claude Code, for up to 30 minutes, and as idle for other tools. The exception is a Claude Code session that claude agents --json reports as waiting: it reads as Needs you, however fresh its transcript.
• "Waiting for permission" and "answered, waiting for your next prompt" both show as Needs you.
• A tool whose title does not move and whose transcript Slate cannot read this way is judged on timing alone, so a turn's end can take up to the window plus a tick to show.

How it stays current#

The server pushes changes (GET /sessions/live/stream; GET /sessions/live is the one-shot); an idle machine sends nothing. A watch re-reads only the changed transcript (150 ms coalescing), plus HEAD of each live checkout and OpenCode's database. Timers run only while needed: 5 s time passing (flips a session to Needs you), 60 s full re-walk, 15 s process list. Your own acts (stop, closed terminal, hand-back) refresh at once (POST /sessions/live/refresh). Branch counts refresh at most every 30 s while sessions report, and on window focus (how an outside commit shows up).