You've got three tabs open.
Tab one is the internal admin tool you're rebuilding. Tab two is a client's landing page redesign. Tab three is a side project you promised yourself you'd finish this quarter.
Each one has its own AI agent chugging away, each in its own window, each looking almost identical to the other two at a glance.
You step away to answer a Slack message. Five minutes later you're back, staring at three windows.
You genuinely can't remember which one finished, which one is still thinking, and which one has been sitting idle with an error for ten minutes.
So you click into window one. Nothing new. Window two. Still running. Window three. Oh, there it is, it finished eight minutes ago and you missed it.
This is the tax nobody mentions when they talk about running "multiple agents at once." It sounds efficient in theory.
In practice, it turns you into a person who periodically tours their own desktop checking on things. That's not what parallel AI work is supposed to feel like.
Multiple projects were never the problem. Losing track of them was
Running several AI coding sessions in parallel is genuinely a good workflow.
Agents are slow relative to how fast you can think, so having more than one going at once means you're not sitting idle waiting on a single response.
The problem isn't the parallelism. It's that most setups give you zero visibility across sessions unless you're actively looking at each one.
Every time you jump between separate windows, you also lose your mental thread. Which one were you debugging? What was the last thing you asked it to do?
You end up re-reading context every single time you switch, which quietly eats the exact time you were trying to save by running things in parallel.
One tab, all your projects, status visible at a glance
Clopen's approach is to keep every project you're working on inside a single browser tab, as entries in a project list rather than as separate windows.
When an agent in any project finishes a task, that project gets a badge in the sidebar. You're not required to babysit each one, you glance at the list and see exactly which project needs your attention right now.
Switching projects is a click in that list, not a window swap.
You land on Project B while Project A's terminal, its agent session, and whatever background process it had running keep executing exactly as they were. Nothing pauses because you looked away.
That's a meaningfully different guarantee than "the window is still open somewhere." The mental model becomes "everything is always running," not "everything is running as long as I don't accidentally close the wrong thing."
Why this actually changes how you delegate
Once you trust that a project won't silently stall the moment you stop watching it, you start treating your AI agents more like actual coworkers you can hand something off to.
You give an agent a real task, move to a different project, do real work there, and come back when the badge tells you there's something to review.
That loop is closer to how you'd manage a team than how you manage a stack of browser tabs.
It also solves a smaller but very real annoyance: closing the tab by accident, or your laptop going to sleep, doesn't nuke your sessions.
Reopen Clopen and the project list, chat history, and terminal output are exactly where you left them. There's no ritual of "did I save everything before closing this."
This scales past your laptop, too
Because it's all a web workspace, it's not chained to one machine either.
If you start something at your desk and want to check on it later from a different device, Clopen's built-in Public Tunnel makes the same project list, same sessions, same terminal output one toggle away from being reachable anywhere.
An authentication mode in Settings keeps that access yours alone. That's a separate story for another day, but it's worth knowing the multi-project workflow doesn't stop the moment you close your laptop lid.
Stop touring your own windows
If you're running more than one AI coding session at a time, the fix isn't discipline or a better window manager.
It's a workspace that tells you what's happening instead of making you go check.
bun add -g @myrialabs/clopen
Give it a shot on a real multi-project week, and see what it's like when "which one finished" is something you glance at instead of something you investigate. Check out the GitHub repository and the landing page for more.
Top comments (0)