Mastodawn

Show HN: Real-time dashboard for Claude Code agent teams

This project (Agents Observe) started as an exploration into building automation harnesses around claude code. I needed a way to see exactly what teams of agents were doing in realtime and to filter and search their output.

A few interesting learnings from building and using this:

- Claude code hooks are blocking - performance degrades rapidly if you have a lot of plugins that use hooks

- Hooks provide a lot more useful info than OTEL data

- Claude's jsonl files provide the full picture

- Lifecycle management of MCP processes started by plugins is a bit kludgy at best

The biggest takeaway is how much of a difference it made in claude performance when I switched to background (fire and forget) hooks and removed all other plugins. It's easy to forget how many claude plugins I've installed and how they effect performance.

The Agents Observe plugin uses docker to start the API and dashboard service. This is a pattern I'd love to see used more often for security (think Axios hack) reasons. The tricky bit was handling process management across multiple claude instances - the solution was to have the server track active connections then auto shut itself down when not in use. Then the plugin spins it back up when a new session is started.

This tool has been incredibly useful for my own daily workflow. Enjoy!

https://github.com/simple10/agents-observe

GitHub - simple10/agents-observe: Real-time observability of claude code sessions & multi-agents.

Real-time observability of claude code sessions & multi-agents. - simple10/agents-observe

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saadn92

The hooks performance finding matches what I've seen. I run multiple Claude Code agents in parallel on a remote VM and the first thing I learned was that anything blocking in the agent's critical path kills throughput. Even a few hundred milliseconds per hook call compounds fast when you have agents making dozens of tool calls per minute.

The docker-based service pattern is smart too. I went a different direction for my own setup -- tmux sessions with worktree isolation per agent, which keeps things lightweight but means I have zero observability into what each agent is actually doing beyond tailing logs manually. This solves that gap in a way that doesn't add overhead to the agent itself, which is the right tradeoff.

Curious about one thing -- how does the dashboard handle the case where a sub-agent spawns its own sub-agents? Does it track the full tree or just one level deep?

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simple10 Apr 1

Sub-agent trees are fully tracked by the dashboard. When an agent is spawned, it always has a parent agent id - claude is sending this in the hooks payload. When you mouse over an agent in the dashboard, it shows what agent spawned it. There currently isn't a tree view of agents in the UI, but it would be easy to add. The data is all there.

[Edit] When claude spawns sub-agents, they inherit the parent's hooks. So all sub-agents activity gets logged by default.