Herdr pixel office

A herdr plugin that renders your AI coding agents as pixel-art characters working in a tiny top-down office.

The room has two zones, and where a character is tells you what its agent is doing:

• The desk bank — agents that are working or blocked sit at a desk, typing, with the monitor glowing in their status color.
• The break room — agents with nothing to do head downstairs. They sit on the sofa, wander, stand around chatting, fetch a coffee from the machine, and pair off for table tennis or a game of pool.

When an agent's status changes it walks between the two. Start a turn and the character gets up from the sofa and walks to a desk; finish one and it wanders back. Desks are drawn whether or not anyone is at them, so the room reads as an office rather than a grid of agents.

Characters act out what the agent is actually doing — not just its coarse status. The plugin reads each agent's pane and pulls out the live tool call, so a character types while editing or running commands and reads while searching, with the tool shown under its desk (Reading office.ts, Running: npm test). Gauges under each desk track context and rate-limit usage. Idle characters get up and wander the common area, pathing around the furniture, then head back for a sit-down.

What it reads, and what it doesn't

Worth knowing before you install anything that watches your terminals:

• It calls agent.read on your herdr panes, which returns the visible text of those panes — your prompts, the agent's output, file paths, commands. That is how the activity label, the reading-vs-typing animation and the gauges work. Only the last ~30 visible lines are requested, and only the derived fields (tool name, a truncated label, two percentages, a sub-agent count) are kept.
• It makes no network connections at all. The only socket it opens is the local herdr Unix socket, and the only process it spawns is herdr status server --json, to find that socket when the env var is absent. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no remote anything, and zero runtime dependencies that could add some — dependencies in package.json is empty and stays that way.
• It writes exactly one file: the state below.
• The one thing it does to your session is agent.focus, when you press Enter or click a selected character.

If you would rather it not read pane contents, the office still works without the scraper — you lose the activity labels, the reading pose and the gauges, but statuses, zones, wandering and focus all come from agent.list.

Requirements

• herdr 0.7.0 or newer — check with herdr --version

Install

From the herdr marketplace

herdr plugin install devangchhajed/herdr-pixel-office

Start it

From the command line

The same action, invoked by hand:

herdr plugin action invoke open --plugin pixel.office

Or open the pane yourself, if you want it somewhere other than a right-hand split — --placement takes split, tab, overlay or zoomed:

herdr plugin pane open --plugin pixel.office --entrypoint office \
  --placement tab --focus

A keybinding (the way you will actually use it)

Add this to ~/.config/herdr/config.toml:

[[keys.command]]
key = "prefix+o"
type = "plugin_action"
command = "pixel.office.open"
description = "Open Pixel Office"

Then pick it up without restarting your session:

herdr config check            # catches a typo before it costs you a restart
herdr server reload-config

prefix+o now opens the office in a split to the right of whatever you are working in.

Using it

Reading the room

The first thing to know is that position is status — you can tell what your agents are doing without reading a word:

• Someone at a desk is working or blocked. Look here first.
• Someone in the break room is idle, done, or unknown. Nothing needs you.
• An amber monitor and a raised hand is an agent blocked on you — a ? bubble for a question, … for a permission prompt. The bubble stays up until you deal with it, which is why blocked agents keep their desk instead of wandering off.
• A green flickering monitor is a live turn. The character types for write-ish tools and reads a held-up page for read-ish ones.
• A checkmark that fades is a turn that just finished.

Under each desk is the live tool call (Reading office.ts, Running: npm test) and two gauges for context and rate-limit usage.

Getting to an agent

Select a character with the arrow keys or a click, then press Enter to jump your terminal to that agent's pane. Clicking an already-selected character does the same thing in one gesture. That is the main loop: see an amber desk, press Enter, deal with it.

If you are running more agents than fit on screen, Tab to the Roster — the same agents as a table, sorted with anything blocked at the top.

Keys

Key	Effect
Tab	Next screen: Office → Roster → Settings
↑ ↓ ← →	Move the selection; the camera follows
Enter / f	Focus the selected agent's terminal (on Settings, edit the company name)
Home / End	Jump to the desks / the break room
PgUp / PgDn	Scroll half a screen
n	Name tags on or off
t	Break-room chatter (off by default)
s	Bell when an agent blocks
c	Wall clock
r	Water reminder
w	Pin the reminder on screen so you can see it without waiting for the hour
q	Quit

Mouse

Action	Effect
Click a character	Select it
Click it again	Focus its terminal
Drag a character	Move it to another desk
Hover a character	Tooltip: status, activity, project, gauges
Scroll wheel	Scroll the room
Click a tab	Switch screen
Click the cat	It is pleased

When people are off-screen a ▴ n ▾ n hint shows how many are above and below.