Glossary

The words this manual uses, grouped by where you meet them.

The fleet

Fleet — the agents under one command. Yours, all of them, whatever they are working on.

Agent — one running session, interactive or background, under either harness. Every agent has a row on the rail.

Subagent — an agent another agent started. It sits indented under the one that started it.

Concierge — the built-in agent at the top of the rail, the one other agents ask for things. Selecting it clears the rail’s selection, so the activity feed and the Usage tab widen to the whole fleet.

Harness — the command-line tool that actually runs an agent: Claude Code or Codex CLI. Nightdesk watches harnesses and launches them; it is not one itself, and it never changes what one reports.

Where work happens

Project — a repository Nightdesk watches.

Checkout — a copy of a project on disk, and the place a session runs.

Worktree — a second working copy of the same repository on its own branch. Launch in a worktree starts a session in a fresh one instead of in the checkout itself.

Profile — a named account Nightdesk can launch Claude Code as, with its own settings folder and its own sign-in. You list profiles by hand in spawn-profiles.json.

Seat — a Codex account in that same list, with the approval and sandbox policy its sessions start under.

The window

Rail — the left column: your fleet, one row per agent.

Center column — the middle: whichever agent you have selected, plus anything you have opened as a tab beside it.

Project drawer — the right column. It holds the activity feed and nothing else.

Activity feed — the record of what Nightdesk has watched happen, newest at the bottom. See The activity feed.

Tab — anything open in the center column beside the session itself: a pull request, a delivered preview, a terminal, the Tasks tab, the Usage tab.

Warnings strip — at the foot of the rail, the things currently wrong: a checkout whose last test run failed, a session that cannot reach Nightdesk, and so on. It shows current state, unlike the feed, which shows events.

Accounts strip — below it: how much of each account’s usage window is gone, and when it resets.

Reading a row

Status — what an agent is doing, in a word and a color: working, needs input, needs permission, failed, idle. It always follows what the harness reports.

Context badge — how full a session’s context window is, colored green through red as it fills.

Unseen dot — a mark beside a row whose agent has done something since you last looked at it.

The verbs

Launch — start a new session.

Attach — open an existing session again. It never restarts anything.

Restart — stop a session and bring it back, always after asking.

Branch a Copy — attach to a fork of a session’s history, leaving the original alone.

Two things you can turn on

Stall nudger — off by default; armed, it re-sends the single word Resume. to a Claude Code session the harness reported stalled on an API error, and does nothing else. See The stall nudger.

Keep awake — holds your Mac awake while a long run finishes. See Keep awake.

Trying it out

Demo mode — Nightdesk running on canned data instead of your real fleet, so you can see every surface without having anything running.