See your Claude Code subagents working in real time — right inside VSCode, with no external server.

When Claude Code fans out work to parallel subagents (Explore, Plan, code-reviewer, general-purpose…), they normally run invisibly. Agent Watch gives you a live dashboard in the sidebar: one card per agent showing its type, task description, status, and a ticking elapsed timer.

Features

🟢 Live cards for every subagent the moment it spawns — pulsing while running, gray when done
⏱️ Elapsed time updated every 500 ms
🧵 Parallel agents shown side by side as they run concurrently
📜 Session history of completed agents, with one-click clear
🪶 Zero infrastructure — no server, no localhost port, no background process. Just a tiny hook script and a local JSONL file
🌍 Works in any project — hooks are global, so every Claude Code session is monitored no matter which folder it runs in

How it works

~/.claude/settings.json        ← Agent Watch registers PreToolUse/PostToolUse hooks (matcher "Agent|Task")
~/.claude/agent-watch-hook.js  ← tiny helper appends one JSON line per agent start/finish
~/.claude/agent-events.jsonl   ← the extension tails this file and renders the panel

On first activation the extension asks for permission to register the hooks. It backs up your settings.json to settings.json.agent-watch-backup before touching it, and only ever appends its own two entries — your existing settings are preserved.

The hook helper is deliberately paranoid: it never writes to stdout, never exits non-zero, and never blocks or breaks Claude Code, even if something goes wrong.

Requirements

Claude Code installed and used on this machine
Node.js available on your PATH (the hook helper runs with node)

Commands

Command	What it does
`Agent Watch: Open Panel`	Focus the sidebar panel
`Agent Watch: Install Claude Code Hooks`	(Re)register the hooks in `~/.claude/settings.json`
`Agent Watch: Uninstall Claude Code Hooks`	Remove the hooks and the helper script, leaving everything else untouched
`Agent Watch: Clear History`	Clear finished agents from the panel and the event log

Privacy

Everything stays on your machine. The hook records only the agent type, the one-line task description, the session id, and the working directory into ~/.claude/agent-events.jsonl (capped at ~1 MB with automatic rotation). Nothing is sent anywhere.

Uninstalling

Run Agent Watch: Uninstall Claude Code Hooks before removing the extension to clean up ~/.claude/settings.json. If you forget, the leftover hooks fail silently and never affect Claude Code — you can also delete the two agent-watch-hook.js entries by hand.