We gave our coding agents a pixel-art shrine (and it made babysitting them bearable)

Rohan Bedi — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:01:31 +0000

Disclosure: I'm Rohan, and I work on Shrine. This is the build story, with the link at the end.

A few months ago, our normal workday turned into herding agents. Three or four Claude Code and Codex sessions going at once, across a couple of repos. The work was fine. The problem was us. We'd come back from a coffee to find one session had been sitting on a permission prompt for 40 minutes while we assumed it was busy.

Version one: notifications

The first fix was the obvious one: fire a macOS notification when an agent needs you. It worked for about a day. Then the notifications piled up, they all looked the same, and none of them told you which session they were about. "Claude needs your attention" is useless when there are four Claudes.

Version two: the notch

So we moved it to the one bit of the screen we always see. Shrine lives in the notch and shows each session as working, idle or needs input, grouped by project. When one needs you, it says so. Most of our bugs were in the state transitions, not the UI: sessions that end without saying goodbye, sub-tasks, and long pauses that look like idling.

The bit nobody asked for

Then we noticed something odd. A day of agent work leaves you with nothing to look at. You might have shipped six pull requests, but it feels like you spent the day typing "yes" into terminals.

So we gave the notch a room. It opens into an isometric pixel-art shrine. You start with a frog at a laptop and a lantern. Pushes, pull requests and long research runs earn achievements, and each one tells you what earned it and what's next, then sparkles its way into the island. The room follows your Mac's clock, so at night the wood stove and lantern glow.

Then the pets. Every agent session gets its own little pixel companion, and it's on that session's notifications too. That turned out to be useful as well as cute: you know who's calling before you've read a word.

Then loot, because of course. Agent-minutes fill "offerings". Crack one open over the room and out come frogs, lanterns, a sakura tree. Duplicates become Petals for a shop. Petals only come from offerings, never money. We were firm on that.

What we learned

The boring part has to be boring. If the status is wrong even once a day, nobody trusts the pretty part.
Identity beats information. A face on a notification did more than a longer message.
People screenshot the room, not the status. So we added "save or copy a picture of your sanctuary".
Ship the welcome and the demo mode. Half the people who try a monitoring app have nothing running at that moment.

Try it

Shrine is free, opens without an account or licence key, and needs macOS 14+ on Apple silicon. It's a signed, notarized DMG that keeps itself up to date. Pro (£14.99/month) is optional, for theme packs and add-ons as they arrive.

If you try it, I'd love to hear what you think should count as an unlock, and where the status gets it wrong.