Argus

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Single Machine ​

Once you've installed Argus, supervising your agents on one machine takes a few commands. This page explains what's happening underneath — the node and how discovery works — so you can run Argus the way that fits you.

Nodes ​

A node is the background process that does the real work: it discovers agent sessions, controls their tmux panes, and serves a local API (a unix socket) that the TUI talks to. You don't talk to the node directly — the TUI does.

There are two ways a local node comes to life:

  • Ephemeral — running argus with no node already up offers to spawn one. It's tied to that TUI and dies when you quit.

    sh
    argus          # open the TUI (can spawn an ephemeral node if none is running)

  • Persistent — argus start runs a node in the foreground that keeps going regardless of whether a TUI is open.

    sh
    argus start    # run a persistent node

Discovery ​

Argus finds agent sessions by scanning your tmux panes — there's no per-session setup. Just start a supported agent inside a tmux session and it shows up:

sh
tmux new -s work
cd ~/code/my-project
claude          # or codex, or agy — Argus discovers them all

Don't use tmux? Let Argus wrap it ​

Argus can only watch the live screen and type into a session when the agent runs inside tmux (outside tmux, a session still shows up and works — it just loses those two features). argus spawn sets that up for you — it starts an agent inside tmux and drops you into it, with tmux invisible, so it feels like running the agent directly:

sh
cd ~/code/my-project
argus spawn claude          # or: argus spawn codex, argus spawn antigravity

You can also set a shell alias for this:

sh
alias claude='argus spawn claude'

Keep an always-on node ​

Running argus spawns an ephemeral node that dies when you quit. To keep Argus watching your sessions even with no TUI open — so status is current the moment you reopen it — run a persistent node:

sh
argus start

Leave it running (in its own tmux window, a systemd/launchd service, etc.), and open the TUI against it whenever you want with argus.