AgentPulse

A live trajectory dashboard for AI coding agent sessions. AgentPulse watches local Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex transcripts and classifies what each agent is doing right now: converging, exploring, stuck, done, drifting, or idle.

Drop it in a terminal next to your editor. You get an always-on read across local agent sessions without a model judge, hosted dashboard, telemetry, or outbound network calls.

Requires Node.js 22 or newer.

npx @conalh/agentpulse@latest live

flowchart LR
    Claude["Claude Code<br/>transcripts"] --> Pulse
    Cursor["Cursor<br/>transcripts"] --> Pulse
    Codex["Codex<br/>sessions"] --> Pulse
    Pulse[("AgentPulse<br/>local trajectory classifier")] --> TUI["Live TUI<br/>verdict + narrative"]
    Pulse --> CI["CI snapshot<br/>--once --strict"]
    TUI --> User["Human sees<br/>converging · stuck · drifting"]

    classDef input fill:#1e293b,stroke:#334155,color:#e2e8f0
    classDef engine fill:#0f172a,stroke:#1e293b,color:#e2e8f0,stroke-width:2px
    classDef output fill:#0c4a6e,stroke:#0369a1,color:#e0f2fe
    class Claude,Cursor,Codex input
    class Pulse engine
    class TUI,CI,User output

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Sample narrative on a converging session:

Your agent has been working on the login bug for 18 minutes. It focused
on `src/auth/`, made 3 changes to `session.ts`, and ran the tests after
each change. Tests went from failing to passing. Looks like it solved it.

Verdict: ● converging (confidence 0.85)

See also: warden for deterministic runtime policy, CapabilityEcho for PR-time capability drift, and agent-gov-core for the shared transcript and report primitives.

Where this fits

AgentPulse is the suite's live-observation layer — it watches a running session's trajectory rather than a diff or a finished transcript.

Tool	Input	Catches / decides	Output	Use when
warden	policy + tool action	allow / deny / ask	verdict	you need deterministic runtime policy decisions
CapabilityEcho	PR diff	new executable capability	annotations + report	code gains network/subprocess/eval/lifecycle/workflow power
AgentPulse	live session events	trajectory state	terminal dashboard	you want live session observation
agent-gov-core	shared schemas/parsers	common Finding/Report model	npm library	tools need shared report primitives

Why this exists

AI agents can run for a long time while the human is not staring at every tool call. Sometimes they converge. Sometimes they explore. Sometimes they get stuck in the same failed loop. Sometimes they touch a privileged path, pipe a network fetch straight into a shell, or write outside the repo.

AgentPulse exists to make that session state visible while the work is happening. It is deterministic local signal, not an LLM judging another LLM.

What it shows

Signal	What it means
converging	Focused edits plus verification, often with tests moving toward passing.
exploring	Reading and orientation, no meaningful edit trajectory yet.
stuck	Repeated edits/tests/failures, user pushback, or loop-like behavior.
done	Completion language plus idle gap.
drifting	A deterministic drift rule fired (privileged-path access, a shell-piped network fetch like curl … | sh, or a write outside the repo root). See Drift detection scope.
idle	Activity has gone quiet or the window had no recent movement.

Drift detection scope. The drifting bucket is a deterministic first-pass detector, not a comprehensive agent-safety scanner. It currently fires on exactly three rule families:

• Privileged-path access — a tool input path, or a path-shaped token inside a shell command (quote-aware, including bash -c "…" payloads), touching .ssh, .aws, .kube, /etc/shadow, or /private/var.
• Shell-piped network fetch — curl/wget piped into sh/bash/zsh. Detection is tokenizer-based (agent-gov-core's quote-aware tokenizeShell), so quoted URLs (curl "https://…" | sh) are caught while a curl … | sh quoted inside another command's argument (e.g. gh release create --notes "…") is not a false positive.
• Write outside the repo root — a Write/Edit to a path outside the session's cwd (or, with no repo root, outside /tmp, /var, ~). ./.. segments are resolved lexically before comparison and ~-prefixed paths count as outside; symlink escapes are not resolved.

So drifting means "a known risky pattern fired" — not "this session is safe." It does not yet cover bash <(curl …), curl -o … && sh …, bash -c "curl … | sh" nesting, PowerShell iwr | iex, python -c/node -e download-and-exec, package install hooks, credential exfiltration through ordinary files, or API-driven network actions. Treat a clean run as "none of the implemented rules matched," and pair AgentPulse with the rest of the agent-gov suite for deeper gating.

What makes it different

Several tools watch agent sessions. AgentPulse's wedge is the specific combination none of them cover:

	Local-only	No LLM	Trajectory verdict	Per-session live dashboard	PR gate
LangSmith / Langfuse / AgentOps	❌ cloud	❌ LLM-judge	❌ traces only	⚠	⚠
Claude Code Session Memory	✅	❌ LLM	⚠ structured	❌	❌
agenttrace	✅	✅	❌ metrics only	⚠ TUI	✅
AgentPulse	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅

The wedge is the combination. AgentPulse pairs naturally with agenttrace for cost/health metrics and with the rest of the agent-gov suite for PR-time gates.

agentpulse live — the live dashboard

agentpulse live [options]

Options:

Flag	Default	Effect
--window <duration>	20m	Recap window per session (5m, 1h, etc.)
--refresh <duration>	30s	Background refresh cadence. Watcher fires sub-second on file changes regardless.
--roots <p1,p2,...>	platform defaults	Override discovery roots (comma-separated)
--stale <duration>	1h	Skip sessions older than this
--max-depth <N>	unbounded	Cap discovery recursion depth below each root
--exclude <d1,d2,…>	none	Directory names to skip during discovery (e.g. node_modules,.git)
--hide-idle	off	Hide sessions with no activity in the window (also honored with --once)
--max-sessions <N>	10	Cap the list. With --once this is display-only — gating still considers every session.
--show-subagents	off	Include agent-<hex> SDK-spawned subagent transcripts
--no-detectors	off	Skip the drifting bucket entirely
--once	off	Headless snapshot mode. Runs once, prints, exits.
--format <fmt>	text	With --once: text or json.
--strict	off	With --once: exit 1 if any session is drifting or stuck.
--fail-on-error	off	With --once --strict: also exit 1 if a session failed to analyze (unreadable/corrupt transcript).
--redact <mode>	none	Redact transcript-derived paths from --once output: none, paths, all.
--notify <mode>	none	Local notification on transition into drifting/stuck: none, bell, os, both.

Keyboard:

Key	Action
↑ ↓ / k j / w s	Move selection
r	Force refresh on selected session
a	Whitelist current session's drift findings; preview first, confirm within 3s
n	Name / rename the selected session alias
?	Toggle help overlay
q / Ctrl-C	Quit

Agent aliases

When multiple agents work on the same project, the dashboard rows can look identical until you name them. Press n on a selected row, type an alias like CC1, frontend, or backend, and press Enter.

Aliases live in two optional JSON files:

• <session.cwd>/.agentpulse-aliases.json — per-project, commit if you want team-shared conventions.
• ~/.agentpulse/aliases.json — personal default.

{
  "version": 1,
  "aliases": {
    "c3d4566ef4c5": "CC1",
    "7a8b91234567": "CG1"
  }
}

Exception baseline

Press a on a drifting session to preview the drift findings, then press a again within the confirmation window to append the selected fingerprints to <session.cwd>/.agentpulse-exceptions.json. AgentPulse refreshes and re-classifies the session immediately.

Commit the exception file to your repo when the behavior is intentionally approved. CI gating (agentpulse live --once --strict or the GitHub Action) honors the same baseline.

{
  "version": 1,
  "exceptions": [
    {
      "kind": "agent_pulse.live_drift_shell_exfil",
      "fingerprint": "a1b2c3...",
      "approvedAt": "2026-05-23T22:00:00.000Z",
      "note": "approved by user via TUI"
    }
  ]
}

Notifications

--notify <mode> fires a local notification when any session transitions into drifting or stuck.

Mode	Effect
none	Silent
bell	Writes \x07 to stderr
os	Native notification: osascript on macOS, notify-send on Linux, BurntToast/NotifyIcon on Windows
both	Bell + OS

Best-effort: missing OS notification utilities are a silent no-op rather than a crash.

CI integration

GitHub Action

- uses: Conalh/AgentPulse@v0.8.1
  with:
    transcript-dirs: agentpulse-transcripts
    strict: 'true'
    redact: paths
    comment-on-pr: 'true'
    github-token: ${{ github.token }}

The action runs agentpulse live --once against the provided transcript directory, writes a markdown summary to the GitHub step summary, optionally posts a sticky PR comment, and fails the workflow when strict: true and any session is drifting or stuck.

By default, the gate fails closed on analysis errors (fail-on-error: true) and hosted output reduces paths to basenames (redact: paths). Set fail-on-error: false to make unreadable or corrupt transcripts advisory. Use redact: none only for trusted private output, or redact: all when project labels, narratives, and topic keywords may also be sensitive. Other inputs include max-depth and exclude for bounded discovery, plus hide-idle, max-sessions, no-detectors, and show-subagents.

Sticky PR comments require pull-requests: write permission and an explicit github-token: ${{ github.token }} input. Omit both when the step summary is enough.

Supply chain. The Action builds and executes the checked-out Action source with npm ci --ignore-scripts, using the committed lockfile. Pin to a full commit SHA when you need AgentPulse's code and dependency graph to be immutable. npm remains the download source for the lockfile-pinned packages.

Privacy. The step summary and PR comment contain transcript-derived project labels, verdicts, drift counts, narratives, and topic keywords. Paths are reduced to basenames by default, but labels and narrative text remain. Use redact: all when those fields may be sensitive, and never publish raw transcript artifacts or unreviewed JSON snapshots.

Raw CLI

npx @conalh/agentpulse@latest live --once --strict --roots <transcript-dir>

Add --format json to pipe a structured snapshot into downstream tools.

agentpulse recap — single-transcript mode

agentpulse recap --transcript-dir ~/.claude/projects/<your-project>/ --format json

Same pipeline, narrower input. Use --watch for a polling re-emit loop.

What's intentionally not in scope

• No LLM, anywhere. Not for summarization, not for classification.
• No outbound network calls. Reads local transcript files, writes to terminal and optional local notifier.
• No web UI / hosted dashboard. TUI for live view, GitHub Action for PRs, JSON output for everything else.
• No multi-session memory. Each invocation reads the window and exits.
• No “AI to review AI” loop. Detectors are deterministic.

Architecture

Deterministic pipeline. Each layer is pure where it can be; all layers share the src/types.ts contract.

Layer	File	Input -> Output
1. Parser	agent-gov-core/parsers/ (v1.1.0+)	Claude Code / Cursor / Codex / Antigravity JSONL -> TranscriptEvent[]
2. Enrichment	src/enrich.ts	events -> keywords, cwd-relative path clusters, action classes
2.5. Sequences	src/sequences.ts	events -> ordered-pattern signal (tdd_loop / stuck_loop / refuse_to_verify / exploratory_edit)
3. Outcome	src/trajectory.ts	events -> verification trend, user tone, completion verbs, idle gap
4. Trajectory	src/trajectory.ts	enrichment + outcome + sequence + exceptions -> six-bucket verdict
5. Narrative	src/narrative.ts	verdict -> plain-English recap

Live infrastructure on top: src/sessions/ discovery/watcher, src/orchestrator.ts, src/exceptions.ts, src/notifications.ts, src/once.ts, and src/tui/.

Design choices worth flagging

• Local by default. Zero network calls in any code path.
• Deterministic. Same transcript window in, same verdict out. No model drift, API outages, or rate limits.
• Live observation. AgentPulse reports the trajectory of active local sessions and provides a one-shot format for CI artifacts.
• Substrate-built. Uses agent-gov-core primitives where the parser and report contracts overlap.
• Tested. 296 tests (npm test), including hand-rolled property tests (a seeded, replayable PRNG with 200 iterations per invariant) over the pure classifier layers and a labeled golden-replay corpus of 13 transcript fixtures spanning all six trajectory buckets across Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Antigravity.

Windows terminal note

If you're running on Windows, prefer Windows Terminal over legacy cmd.exe. It works on cmd.exe, but Windows Terminal renders the dashboard more cleanly.

Related public tools

Repo	What it catches
warden	Deterministic allow / deny / ask policy decisions.
CapabilityEcho	Capability drift introduced by code, manifests, workflows, and Dockerfiles.
AgentPulse (this repo)	Live local trajectory verdicts for active agent sessions.
agent-gov-core	Shared parsers, the canonical Finding schema, and mergeFindings.

MIT.