Agentic Coding Has a Babysitting Problem

The pitch for AI coding agents is delegation: describe the work, walk away, come back to a finished job. We bought that pitch. We use Claude Code and Codex every day at this studio, and they genuinely do the work.

What nobody mentions is that you never actually walk away.

The agent works. You hover.

Here’s the loop we caught ourselves in. Kick off a long run. Glance at the terminal. Still going. Glance again. Still going. Wander off, come back — the Mac went to sleep and the run stalled twenty minutes ago. Fine, disable sleep system-wide, kick it off again, leave for the evening. Next morning: the run finished five minutes after you left, then the machine sat there, lit up, doing nothing all night.

And the finishes are the easy case. Agents also stop and wait — for a permission, for an answer, for you. There’s no sound for that. A waiting agent looks exactly like a working agent from across the room, so you check. And check. Each check that finds nothing is a context switch you paid for anyway.

The tools are brilliant. The workflow around them leaks time from three places: the Mac sleeps when it shouldn’t, the agent waits in silence, and you keep coming back to look. Delegation with hovering isn’t delegation — it’s babysitting with extra steps.

Pirates don’t stand watch over a ship that sails itself

So we built the thing we wanted on our own desks: a small menu bar app that stands the watch for you. It’s called BlackFlare, and the idea fits in one sentence — your Mac stays awake while an agent is running, and you get pinged the moment it finishes or needs you.

That one sentence dissolves the whole loop. Overnight runs finish on their own because the Mac won’t sleep mid-session — and sleeps normally the second the work is done. The silence is gone because the ping finds you: on your desktop, or on Telegram or Slack when you’ve stepped away from the desk entirely.

Along the way it picked up the other small frictions we kept tripping on — switching model or permission mode from the menu instead of hand-editing configs, and plan usage sitting right in the menu bar so limits stop being a surprise.

The test we hold it to is simple: can you start a run, leave the building, and trust that the machine will work and the news will reach you? That’s what “agentic” was supposed to mean.

Take the watch off your calendar

BlackFlare is a free download for macOS — the full story, docs, and pricing live at blackflare.dev. If you spend your days with Claude Code or Codex, take it for a sail.

Pirates don’t fight for medals, they fight for freedom — including the freedom to leave the terminal unattended. 🏴‍☠️