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

Show HN: Real-time dashboard for Claude Code agent teams(github.com)

77 points by simple10 46 days ago | 28 comments

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!

saadn92 46 days ago |

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?

simple10 46 days ago | |

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.

petcat 46 days ago |

Are you guys spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a day on Claude tokens? Holy crap. I can't get more than one or two agents to do anything useful for very long before I'm hitting my usage limits.

kami23 46 days ago | |

I'm in a great situation where I've been piloting Claude for the company among a small group of others. I've been obsessed with pushing the limits of how many sessions and agents I can working at a time. We threw some work at Gas Town and another Orchestrator but they felt too rigid and opinionated for my liking. But I'm biased, I want to make my own eventually.

When I go home to my $20 plan I am sad and annoyed but I don't want to put more in for what is a good enough for me to work a bit at a time, a good pomodoro timer for me personally.

Something like this is perfect for some of the issues that I've wanted to solve as a command and control tool with malleable visuals.

OP: This is cool, thank you for sharing.

simple10 46 days ago | |

I hit a lot of limits on Pro plan. Upgraded to Max $200/mo plan and haven't hit limits for awhile.

It's super important to check your plugins or use a proxy to inspect raw prompts. If you have a lot of skills and plugins installed, you'll burn through tokens 5-10x faster than normal.

Also have claude use sub-agents and agent teams. They're significantly lighter on token usage when they're spawned with fresh context windows. You can see in Agents Observe dashboard exactly what prompt and response claude is using for spawning sub-agents.

edwhitesell 46 days ago | |

I'd bet there are many. I know a few teams with spends in the thousands of dollars per day. It sounds crazy, but not too unrealistic.

PermissionTrail 46 days ago | |

I've been having the same issue. It's such a shame because it is levels above the other AIs

kami23 46 days ago |

I tried using hooks for setting up my DIYed version of what channels is now in Claude. I had Claude writing them and not really looking at the results cause the vibes are strong. It struggled with odd behaviors around them. Nice to see some of the possible reasons, I ended up killing that branch of work so I never figured out exactly what was happening.

Now I'm regretting not going deeper on these. This is the type of interface that I think will be perfect for some things I want to demonstrate to a greater audience.

Now that we have the actual internals I have so many things I want to dig through.

simple10 46 days ago | |

Right on. Good luck! You might also want to play around with https://github.com/simple10/agent-super-spy if you want to see the raw prompts claude is sending. It was really helpful for me to see the system prompts and how tool calls and message threads are handled.

nemo8312 46 days ago |

This is exactly what I needed. Running 4 autonomous marketing agents (content, engagement, learning, strategy) and the hardest part is visibility into what they're doing. Currently built a custom daily activity summary but it's basic. How do you handle the case where agents are running fine but producing bad outputs? We had an issue where the quality scorer's centroids went stale and the agent kept posting content that scored "ok" internally but got zero real engagement.

LeoStehlik 46 days ago |

This is what I've been missing running multi-agent ops through OpenClaw.

The opacity problem is the one I hit hard: when a coordinator spawns 3-4 agents in parallel (builder, reviewer, tester, each with their own tool calls), the only visibility you have is what they choose to report back. Which is often sanitised and … dangerously optimistic.

The role separation / independent verification structure I run helps catch bad outputs, but it doesn't give me the live timeline of HOW an agent got to a conclusion. That's why I find this genuinely useful.

Noticed OpenClaw is already on the roadmap - had my hands tingling to fork and adapt it. Starring it for now and added to my watchlist. The hook architecture should translate … OpenClaw fires session events that could feed the same pipeline. Looking forward to seeing that happen.

cdnsteve 44 days ago |

This looks to solve something I've been struggling with in my project, Sugar (1). Using the SDK and having sub agents running I found it difficult to have real- time insight into exactly what they were doing.

You can create a huge task list and Ralph mode can crank through it and also store persistent memory.

Interested in trying them together. 1. https://github.com/roboticforce/sugar

silbercue 44 days ago |

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

can confirm. ended up being really careful about what runs synchronously vs in the background.

IMHO the "sanitised optimism" thing others mention here is real too. had to add explicit verification steps because Claude kept reporting success when it just silenced the error. now I always make it prove things actually worked before moving on.

kangraemin 44 days ago |

The "sanitised optimism" problem is real. I've seen agents report "fixed!" when they just suppressed the error.

Role separation (builder/reviewer/tester) helps but the reviewer agent also tends to be too polite. Making the reviewer explicitly output PASS/FAIL/UNKNOWN with no room for "looks good overall" is the only thing that worked for me.

sumeno 46 days ago |

So many comment sections on these vibe coded Show HNs are just full of obvious bots talking to each other in the most generic boring way.

simple10 46 days ago | |

Yep. I finally realized what "green" accounts are for on HN. Recently created accounts.

warwickmcintosh 46 days ago |

The sanitised optimism problem mentioned upthread is the real gap here. Event stream logging tells you what tools were called and in what order, but it doesn't tell you whether the agent's self-reported outcome matches reality.

nwlsrb 45 days ago |

I think there's a huge amount of value in just having a clear visual timeline of what all these sub-agents are actually doing behind the scenes

ivaivanova 46 days ago |

Good to know background hooks make that much of a difference. How are you handling the case where multiple agent teams are writing to the same jsonl files simultaneously?

simple10 46 days ago | |

I'm not actually reading the jsonl files. Agents Observe just uses hooks and sends all hook data the server (running as a docker container by default).

Basic flow:

1. Plugin registers hooks that call a dump pipe script that sends hook events data to api server

2. Server parses events and stores them in sqlite by session and agent id - mostly just stores data, minimal processing

3. Dashboard UI uses websockets to get real-time events from the server

4. UI does most of the heavy lifting by parsing events, grouping by agent / sub-agent, extracting out tool calls to dynamically create filters, etc.

It took a lot of iterations to keep things simple and performant.

You can easily modify the app/client UI code to fully customize the dashboard. The API app/server is intentionally unopinionated about how events will be rendered. This was by design to add support for other agent events soon.

ivaivanova 46 days ago | | |

The hooks approach seems much cleaner for real-time. Did you run into any issues with the blocking hooks degrading performance before you switched to background?

canadiantim 45 days ago | | |

If you're just saving it into sqlite, why is server even needed?

theagentwall 46 days ago |

great idea. I am curious what the future of coding with multiple terminals and agents will look like and this looks like a great start!

simple10 46 days ago | |

Thanks! This was step one in my daily driver stack - better observability. I also bundled up a bunch of other observability services in https://github.com/simple10/agent-super-spy so I can see the raw prompts and headers.

The next big layer for my personal stack is full orchestration. Something like Paperclip but much more specialized for my use cases.

minnzen 46 days ago |

Cool project. The React reconciler underneath Claude Code's terminal layer is a solid foundation for this kind of real-time rendering.

neozz 44 days ago |

Looks cool