VibePulse

A little always-on screen for your shelf that shows what your AI coding agents are doing — taps you on the shoulder when one is stuck waiting for you, and (if you want) lets you answer it with a tap on the glass. It packs too: one command moves it onto whatever WiFi you are on today, and one button-hold on the panel opens its own settings on the glass.

Claude Code and Codex usage, live agent activity, and a full-screen NEEDS YOU alert you can answer with a tap. A three-second hold on the panel's one user button opens SETTINGS on the glass — update the firmware, teach it a new network, or read its address. A ~$30 ESP32-S3 panel plus a core, pure-stdlib Python service on your Mac or Windows PC. Local mode needs no VibePulse account and keeps agent activity on your LAN. The optional numbers-only relay can carry quota data across isolated WiFi; a separate, default-off encrypted interaction relay can carry supported Needs You decisions without requiring the panel and computer to share a LAN. A third, independent Live agent status relay can keep the Claude/Codex activity rows current across ordinary internet WiFi. Every cloud feature is off by default; only the encrypted interaction/status relay adds the pinned Python cryptography dependency.

The problem

When you run coding agents all day, two things are invisible:

• How much quota is left. You usually find out you're at the wall when a long task dies halfway through — not before you start it.
• When an agent stopped. It asks one yes/no question and then just sits there. You're in another window. Sometimes for twenty minutes.

Both answers already exist, buried in a terminal you're not looking at. VibePulse moves them onto a screen you can't miss: one glance from across the room, no window to switch to, no menu bar to squint at.

Status: v1.1.0. The core shelf-screen loop is real and physically exercised on macOS and Windows: see quota, see an agent waiting, and answer a supported prompt on the glass. The Windows core, physical answer loop and persistent sign-in/sleep/reboot lifecycle were verified at the v1.0.0 host runtime and are not re-claimed for a later one. v1.1.0 adds SETTINGS on the glass, an honest warm-up, and crash evidence in the firmware; the firmware side is CI-built and waits for the next flash session. Optional integrations remain opt-in, and every platform claim stays tied to its recorded evidence.

Start here

VibePulse is built for vibecoders — people who build with Claude Code or Codex. You do not need to read this whole page:

1. Have the board? Check What you need, then follow Setup, the vibecoder way: your coding agent does the setup with you, one verified step at a time.
2. No board yet? Run the simulator. Same pixels, on your computer.
3. The core is your Claude/Codex usage on the glass. Answering from the panel, the relays, and GitHub are add-ons, each off by default and opted into separately: today through the setup command, secrets.h, and the table under Independent switches. A 3 s KEY3 hold opens SETTINGS on the glass — UPDATE, WIFI and ABOUT today; the on-glass feature switches are specified but not built yet (see the spec in docs/superpowers/specs/). Sound has no verified backend yet.

Latest release: v1.1.0

The first release after 1.0 gives the panel a menu and a memory. A three-second KEY3 hold opens SETTINGS on the glass (UPDATE, WIFI, ABOUT), so the maintenance window is chosen rather than guessed. The service answers the panel at once after a restart while the first history scan runs, labelling the volume counters as placeholders instead of letting the glass go STALE. A panic now leaves an ELF coredump in flash and a reboot ledger in NVS, every device poller backs off from a dead service, and the logging configuration is pinned by a configure-time guard. The host quarantines a corrupt state file instead of wiping it, says why the Claude probe is idle, names the keychain failure, typesets any model id, and the whole tokenserver directory now reads in English. Never a number it did not measure, still.

v1.1.0 verification

The coredump partition is new in the table, and OTA never writes the table: one USB idf.py -p <port> partition-table-flash is needed before a dump can land, and the boot log says so until then.

Read the v1.1.0 notes · Windows v1 evidence · Full changelog · Compare v1.0.0...v1.1.0

Contributing or validating another host? Read CONTRIBUTING.md, the host support matrix, and SECURITY.md before sharing logs or test evidence.

What's on screen

Six core pages, swipe or auto-rotate, plus the always-present value-multiple page (it shows the dollar total once agents log priced usage, but the multiple itself stays dashed — SET YOUR PLAN COST — until you pick a named plan tier or state your exact cost) and an optional, compile-time-gated GitHub project pulse. Every image below is an exact 480×480 frame — the simulator renders the same pixels as the panel.

Usage — Claude's weekly and heaviest-model-weekly quota, plus Codex's weekly quota. Each with a reset countdown and how much you've burned today.

NEEDS YOU — when an agent blocks on your input, the whole screen turns into the alert, in that provider's colour, naming the project it's waiting on. Tap to dismiss — or, with the opt-in Needs You bridge, tap to answer it without switching windows (see below).

Live agent monitor — the header shows which agents are working right now, with model and effort, on every page. 2 CHATS ACTIVE when several are running.

Burn rate — a forecast per provider: on pace, running out early (and when), or how much head-room is left at reset.

Max Tracker — a GitHub-style heatmap of your daily quota peaks, with coding streaks and max counters, per provider. Red cells are days you maxed out.

Both providers get equal treatment — same pages, same alert, their own accent colour:

Codex weekly quota

Codex NEEDS YOU alert

Claude Max Tracker

Answer Claude or Codex from the panel

The panel becomes an input device. With the opt-in Needs You bridge, when Claude Code or Codex blocks on a supported question or permission, the takeover appears and a tap answers it in the same live session — no window to switch to. The computer must be awake and the tokenserver must be running. Direct mode uses the LAN. The separate encrypted interaction relay works when the panel and computer use unrelated ordinary internet Wi-Fi: both sides make outbound HTTPS connections, so there is no router reconfiguration, inbound port, public Mac, or VPN. Cloudflare handles only fixed-size ciphertext; see the privacy and setup guide.

Attract → decision → done. A held prompt surfaces as a mascot in a depleting countdown ring; a tap reveals it; APPROVE commits the agent's explicitly recommended option (or LEAVE IT hands it back to the computer), and the flow closes on a short "ON IT" beat. The panel signs every verdict with a key shared only with your computer — it can answer a prompt that computer was already going to ask abo