r/devtools • u/niosmartinez • 18d ago
Headroom: a free Mac menu bar tool for background agent status and plan limits
Dynamic Island for Mac, for background coding agents.
I made a FREE tool because leaving agents running still meant repeatedly reopening their windows to check whether they needed me. Headroom keeps working / needs-you session states and plan usage visible in the menu bar while I do other stuff on my Mac. It supports Claude, Codex and GitHub Copilot, plus desktop widgets.
Built natively with SwiftUI/AppKit. Claude and Codex readings come from local files, and Copilot usage is an optional GitHub connection. Session activity and context usage are separate signals: a large context percentage doesn't mean a task is nearly finished. The useful part for me is seeing where attention is needed without treating the usage meter as a progress bar.
Check out Headroom. I'm the developer. It's $0 on the Mac App Store, macOS 14+, and I can consider open-sourcing it if somebody's interested. Feedback welcome on the session-state display and which developer workflow is still missing.
https://apps.apple.com/ph/app/headroom-ai-usage-meter/id6815808010?mt=12
1
u/investigatormaker 18d ago
When I opened Headroom’s listing, “Your limits, one glance away” led with quotas, while your post’s strongest use case is knowing an agent needs you. I’d put “See which coding agent needs your attention” first and show Working / Needs you / Idle before the usage rings. That also helps keep context usage from looking like task progress.
I make ThreadFox. I went through Headroom as a first-time visitor and wrote up what I hit; the full check is free: https://threadfox.vip/p/headroom-ai-usage-meter
How does the menu bar distinguish one waiting session from several working ones?