Sick of Herding AI Cats?

Every Claude session you have running, on one small board.

Clowder is a native Mac status board for AI coding sessions. Each one is a coloured tile: red has stopped and needs you, green has finished, blue is still working. One glance and you know where to go.

Free for ever, four tiles. macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon.

• Idle, active lately

• Idle, long dormant

An agent that finishes quietly has stopped working for you.

Run eight or thirteen Claude sessions across as many worktrees and the difficult part is no longer the work. It is the bookkeeping.

One has stopped to ask whether it may run a command, and will happily wait all afternoon for an answer. Another finished four minutes ago and is just sitting there holding the result. Neither says a word, so off you go looking — a terminal window here, VS Code there, the Claude app behind both — and of course the one you checked last is the one that was waiting.

Clowder is the bit that tells you. Keep it floating in a corner of the screen, or skip the window altogether and keep a row of small squares in the menu bar. Either way it does one thing: when something wants you, you know in seconds rather than a quarter of an hour later.

The five states

Each colour says what the session wants from you.

It is a traffic light for your attention, not for the machine's. Green means go and look, which is why a working session is blue: it wants nothing from you, and giving it the ready colour made the whole board look like it needed attention.

• ! Blocked needs you Stopped on a dialog — a permission prompt, a question, a sandbox request — and going nowhere until you answer. Red, the thickest bar, and a firm pulse. The tile says what it is waiting on.

Blocked needs you

Stopped on a dialog — a permission prompt, a question, a sandbox request — and going nowhere until you answer. Red, the thickest bar, and a firm pulse. The tile says what it is waiting on.

• Done ready Finished since you last looked, so the answer is waiting for you. Green, solid. It stops being green when you have had it in front of you for a while, or the moment you click it.

Done ready

Finished since you last looked, so the answer is waiting for you. Green, solid. It stops being green when you have had it in front of you for a while, or the moment you click it.

• Working running Busy, and wants nothing. Blue, with a slow breathe and three dots rippling, so you can tell at a distance that something is actually happening. Leave it alone.

Working running

Busy, and wants nothing. Blue, with a slow breathe and three dots rippling, so you can tell at a distance that something is actually happening. Leave it alone.

• Recent idle, seen Dealt with, but active within the last hour, so it is still part of today's work. Grey, a thin bar, present without asking for anything.

Recent idle, seen

Dealt with, but active within the last hour, so it is still part of today's work. Grey, a thin bar, present without asking for anything.

• Stale idle, dormant Seen, and long quiet. It recedes to nearly nothing, which is the point: the board should be mostly dark, so that the one thing wearing a colour is the one you look at.

Stale idle, dormant

Seen, and long quiet. It recedes to nearly nothing, which is the point: the board should be mostly dark, so that the one thing wearing a colour is the one you look at.

Colour is never the only signal

Urgency comes through brightness and movement first, colour second, because that is what you catch out of the corner of your eye. Every state also has its own mark and its own bar thickness, so you are never relying on telling two colours apart.

Age is the triage signal

Each tile shows how long it has been in its state, because a prompt open fourteen minutes matters more than one open five seconds. The board sorts on that: state first, then whatever has been waiting on you longest.

What it reads

Five sources, all of them on this Mac.

Clowder watches the files Claude already writes on your own machine. There is no account to make, no sign-in, and nothing is sent anywhere.

• Claude Code in the terminal, your editor, anywhere it runs

• Code in the Claude app the Code tab, including remote sessions

• Claude Cowork in the Claude app

• Claude Design designs in the Claude app

• Claude chats ordinary conversations you have touched lately

Switch on the ones you want

All five work, and all five are in daily use here. You turn each one on in Settings, so your board shows the kinds of work you actually do rather than everything at once.

One honest note. Claude Code announces what it is doing, so those tiles are always right. The other four are read from the Claude app's own files on your Mac, and Claude changes those from time to time without telling anyone. If a source ever goes quiet, that is usually why — and the fix tends to arrive the same day, because this is a small app with one person watching it.

Built for a glance

A board you can act from, not just read.

Click a tile, land in the session

Not the app — the session itself. The right conversation in the Claude app, whether it lives under Chat or under Code. The right tab in VS Code. The right terminal window. With a dozen windows open, bringing an application to the front barely helps; Clowder brings the one you wanted. It only ever raises something already running — it will not open anything for you.

It comes and finds you

The moment a session needs you, its tile hops — once, three times, five, or not at all, whichever you prefer. The Dock icon shows the same picture, and so does the row of small squares in the menu bar, for when the board is buried behind something.

Arranged how you want it

Tiles sort themselves by what is most urgent, so the thing shouting loudest is always top left. If you would rather a particular session stayed put, drag it where you want it and pin it there. Rename anything to a name you will actually recognise, and hide a session — or a whole project — you would rather not see.

Out of the way until it isn't

It floats above your other windows, so it is still there whatever you are working in. Fade it back as far as you like and it will turn solid again the moment your pointer lands on it. Drag a corner or pinch to resize, anywhere from a full wall of tiles down to a thin strip of coloured chips tucked in the corner of the screen.

Or no window at all

Clowder can live entirely in the menu bar, with no board and no Dock icon. Click the squares and every session is listed with its state and how long it has been in it; click one to jump straight there. Hold ⌥ and each row becomes a menu — rename, pin, hide, or move it to a different square — so the whole app works without the board ever being on screen.

As far back as you want

Claude keeps conversations for weeks, so a session earns a tile by having been touched recently rather than by merely existing. That window is yours to set: today, three days, a week, or everything Clowder can see.

Free for ever at four tiles. Two pounds a month for all of them.

Four rather than nothing, because the app has to be useful before anyone buys it. For ever rather than for a fortnight, because a trial that expires leaves you with a window full of nothing on the day you were busiest.

Free

Four tiles on the board.

• Four tiles, no expiry, no account

• Every source, every setting

• Sessions past the fourth are still counted, and still tell you when they need you

Licence

Every session gets a tile. $29 in the US, €28 in the euro area.

• Unlimited tiles

• One person, on as many of their own Macs as they like

• Renews yearly. We email before every renewal and cancelling takes one click

• If it ends, you go back to the free four tiles rather than stopping

The limit is on tiles, not on telling you

A fifth session is still watched, still counted on the board and in the menu bar, and still speaks up when it needs you. Paid or not, Clowder will never quietly let a blocked session sit there.

Unzip it, drag it to Applications, open it.

That is the whole installation. The board appears with whatever you have running.

• macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon.

• Signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so it opens without any arguing.

• Updates itself, quietly, when there is a new version.

• Sadly not on the Mac App Store, and it never can be — the sandbox would block the very files it needs to read, which is the whole trick of the app.

• Your data stays yours. Everything is read here on your Mac and none of it leaves. No account, no sign-in, no telemetry, nothing to opt out of.