Pulse turns raw PTY output into an honest status vocabulary, and Agent Attention reads real Claude Code hook events so one keypress jumps you to the agent that actually needs a human.
Pulse is the per-terminal activity indicator 13x shows in every card header, the focus bar, and a sidebar SYSTEM tally. It distills the PTY output stream into six honest states — BOOT, ACTIVE, IDLE, DONE, ERR, OFF — so a wall of terminals tells you what each one is doing at a glance. Agent Attention layers Claude Code awareness on top: when a slot runs Claude, real hook events override the heuristic, and Ctrl+Space hops you straight to whichever agent is waiting on you.
When a slot runs Claude Code, 13x reads real hook events — prompt, pretool, posttool, notify, stop — appended to a per-slot log. THINKING, TOOL, NEEDS YOU and DONE are facts from the agent, not guesses parsed from output.
Ctrl+Space (and the TopBar 'N NEEDS YOU' counter) cycles to the next agent waiting on a human, prioritized needs_you > turn_done > error, wrapping around. The one slot that's blocked never gets buried.
State is conveyed by dot fill, a check glyph, and label weight — never color. NEEDS YOU renders as an inverted chip via CSS weight, not hue. It reads the same in any light.
A persistent PowerShell PTY never exits when a one-shot command finishes, so DONE is inferred only for oneshot slots that produced output then went quiet. Watch and interactive slots go IDLE, never falsely DONE. Error-pattern scanning is deliberately not implemented.
All agent state comes from local files — per-slot logs under .13x/sessions and your local Claude transcripts under ~/.claude/projects. No network calls. Nothing is sent to a server.
The Rust watcher tails one root per open workspace concurrently, so a backgrounded project's agent state keeps updating while you work in another.
Pulse reads the output stream
A single 1 Hz tick flips a quiet session to ACTIVE on the first byte of output and demotes any session silent for 5 seconds to IDLE — or to DONE only when the slot ran a one-shot command and produced output.
Command mode decides DONE vs IDLE
At launch the backend tags each slot: TEST/GIT that auto-run a command are oneshot (they complete to DONE), DEV/LOG are watch, AGENT is interactive — long-running slots go IDLE, never falsely DONE.
Claude hooks log real events
13x merges seven Claude Code hooks into your global settings; each appends one token to the slot's agent-events.log. Outside a 13x slot the hook is an immediate no-op and never touches foreign settings.
The watcher folds tokens into state
A Rust watcher tails each log per workspace with a 200ms debounce, seeds offsets to current file length so old runs never replay, and emits an agent-state event. On a stop token it peeks the local transcript for the real model.
Attention jumps you to the blocked agent
Ranking needs_you > turn_done > error, Ctrl+Space or the TopBar chip picks the next agent after your current focus and hands it the keyboard. Typing into a slot demotes it back to attached — answering the agent.
For Claude Code agents running in a 13x slot, 13x reads real hook events the agent writes to a per-slot log — prompt, pretool, posttool, notify, stop. A notify event means NEEDS YOU; it's reported by the agent, not inferred from terminal output.
Agent hook states appear only for Claude Code agents in 13x slots with the global hooks installed and the slot env var set. Other agents and CLIs fall back to the plain Pulse heuristics — BOOT, ACTIVE, IDLE, DONE, ERR, OFF.
A persistent interactive PowerShell PTY does not exit when a one-shot command finishes, so there's no per-command exit code. DONE is inferred from quiescence — a oneshot slot that produced output then went quiet for 5 seconds. It's best-effort by design, and watch/interactive slots never auto-complete.
No. Agent state is derived entirely from local files under .13x/sessions and ~/.claude/projects. There are no network calls and no telemetry. Stale events from a previous run are never replayed because offsets seed to the current file length on first watch.
13x is local-first and free of telemetry — your code, commands and shells never leave the machine. Join the waitlist for the next build.