An installer writes a script. It stamps that script with `HERDR_INTEGRATION_ID=claude`, an identifier that exists for no reason other than to say "I made this". Then, to decide whether it has already run, it ignores that stamp entirely and compares the rendered command string in a config file. Rewrite the command to an equivalent form and the installer no longer recognises its own work, so it installs a second copy alongside the first. I hit three bugs in three days. They looked unrelated until I wrote them down next to each other: one in someone else’s tool, two in a plugin of mine. They share a shape, and the shape is worth more than any of the three fixes.
Each agent key on the Stream Deck draws a ring showing how full that session's context window is. Mine sat at 10% for days. Every session, regardless of activity, regardless of how long the agent had been grinding. I found the bug, fixed it, watched agents start reporting correct percentages every single turn, and the ring still said 10%. That was the good part, because it meant there were two. Deleting ClaudeDeck · Part 3 of 5 1 2 3 4 5 🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS Ten percent is a suspicious number. Not zero, which would say “nothing ever arrived”. Not a plausible-looking 37%, which would say “this works and your session is small”. Ten percent is round, and round numbers in a display that should be noisy mean the display is not reading anything.
Six of the ten posts in my "Building ClaudeDeck" series document code that no longer exists. Over four days in August I rebuilt the plugin on herdr's socket API, and the hook dispatcher, the PTY runner, the statusline auto-patcher, the AppleScript focus path, the Claude project watcher and the shell-PID resolver all went in the bin, taking the `.app` bundle, the codesigning step and every TCC prompt with them. Then the substrate sent its invoice. Deleting ClaudeDeck · Part 1 of 5 1 2 3 4 5 🧪 Tested with herdr 0.8.0 · macOS ClaudeDeck was complicated for exactly one reason. Claude Code has no control API, so every fact the plugin needed had to be stolen from somewhere it was not offered.
Once I had six Claude Code sessions open at once, the most expensive part of my workflow was not writing code. It was patrol: cycling through tabs to see which agent was still running and which one had been sitting on a question for ten minutes. tmux has no concept of any of this. To tmux, every pane is a rectangle of terminal, equally interesting, equally mute. herdr’s pitch lands exactly on that pain: panes are still real terminals, but a sidebar shows each agent’s live state. So it got a one-month trial, with exit conditions written down before it started. The verdict lands on August 16, and this post is honest about still being inside the window.