April 14th, 2026

Giving agents a brain + a Mac menu bar for Claude sessions

I'm experimenting with giving my agents a brain using a hybrid model of Karpathy's Obsidian post that everyone is freaking out really excited about. I say hybrid because I don't really have the use case he does where I'm consuming and synthesizing lots of papers from arxiv, but I am really struggling with how to "stay organized" with projects, agents, etc., at a velocity that is beyond what I've ever seen before. In talking with folks it seems this is a pretty common feeling.

In the "slow old days", we would open up a project in a ticketing system, a github repo, and an IDE, and get to work over days and weeks. Then for a new project, repeat. All projects beyond the top few would wait until the brain lock was released, which was likely on the order of magnitude of weeks/months.

Now, at least for me, there's very little IDE, and lots of terminals open just chugging away stuff. And then the next day, same thing. Like having a dozen programmers working for me that are expert level programmers and system adminstrators, but still junior architects where I have to watch over them.

So back to the Obsidian brain.. I guess I'm looking for a way for agents to share knowledge over time, learn, and improve. Maybe those junior architects can become... not so junior. I could return to sessions with full context, or even context from different sessions if needed. Maybe none of of this is needed. I guess we'll see. I added a /checkpoint command to claude code that summarizes the session and adds to the wiki in a special sessions folder.

The analogy of brains and short/long term memory seems to be a big area of exploration in the harness space. Probably for good reason. Reminds me of the serverless days where we would identify a problem (eg cold starts, queue times) and we'd see everyone working on that problem space at the same time (at much slower speeds!).

Oh and to manage all these claude agents, I built a native Mac Swift app. I've always wanted to see a blue duck to build a native Mac app, and now I have one that my intern wrote. It's a toolbar item at the top that drops down to show all Claude Code running sessions and their status (waiting, running, etc.).

And you can open up a window to show all the sessions and the details of each.

What a time to be alive eh?