Five Agents, One Dashboard: Why Context Switching Kills Productivity

If you use multiple AI coding agents, you know the workflow: tab to the Claude terminal, check status, tab to the Codex terminal, check status, open the Anthropic billing page, open the OpenAI billing page. Each context switch takes 10-15 seconds and interrupts whatever you were actually thinking about. Over a day, these micro-interruptions add up to something measurable.

The Five-Terminal Problem

A developer using Claude Code for architecture work, Codex for boilerplate generation, and Gemini CLI for research has at minimum three terminal windows dedicated to agent sessions. Add Aider for legacy codebase work and OpenCode for specific tasks, and you have five terminals that each need periodic attention.

Each agent has its own interface patterns:

• Claude Code shows a conversation thread with inline diffs
• Codex uses a split-pane interface with file previews
• Gemini CLI presents a different conversation format
• Aider has its own command set and status indicators
• OpenCode uses yet another interface pattern

There is no unified status indicator. To know if all your agents are idle, running, or waiting for input, you check each one individually.

Unified Status View

Styrby's dashboard shows all connected agents in a single view:

One glance tells you that Claude is working, Codex needs your attention, and Gemini is done. No terminal switching required.

Color-Coded Agent Identification

Each agent is assigned a consistent color across the dashboard, notifications, and cost charts:

• Claude Code: Orange (Anthropic brand)
• Codex: Green (OpenAI brand)
• Gemini CLI: Blue (Google brand)
• OpenCode: Purple
• Aider: Teal

When a push notification arrives, the color tells you which agent sent it before you read the text. When viewing cost charts, you immediately see which agents are driving spend.

Cost Aggregation

Individual agent billing dashboards show costs for that agent only. If you want total AI spend, you add them up yourself. Styrby aggregates automatically on each page load:

• Daily total: Sum across all agents, broken down by agent in a stacked bar chart
• Weekly and monthly totals: Trend lines showing how spend changes over time
• Cost by tag: How much each tagged project or client costs across all agents used on it
• Model comparison: Cost per agent and model combination, helping you identify where switching to a cheaper model would save the most

Notification Consolidation

Without Styrby, each agent generates its own notifications in its terminal. You see them only when you switch to that terminal. With Styrby, notifications from all agents route to your phone through a single channel.

Notification types across all agents:

• Permission requests (with risk badges)
• Session completion
• Errors (with color-coded attribution)
• Budget alerts
• Retry loop detection

Each notification is tagged with the agent color and name. You can filter notification preferences per agent: maybe you want all notifications from Claude but only errors from Gemini.

The Productivity Argument

Research on context switching consistently shows that each switch costs 15-25 seconds of recovery time, not just the seconds spent switching tabs. When you check five agent terminals every 15 minutes, that is five switches times 20 seconds average, times four rounds per hour: about 7 minutes per hour spent on agent status checking.

A unified dashboard reduces this to one glance. The agents that need attention surface through notifications. The ones running smoothly stay out of your way. That recovered time goes back to actual engineering work.

When You Still Need the Terminal

The Styrby dashboard is a monitoring and control layer, not a replacement for the agent interfaces. When you need to have a detailed conversation with an agent, provide complex context, or review inline diffs, you still use the agent's native terminal. Styrby handles the overhead tasks: status monitoring, cost tracking, permission approval, and session management. The agents still do the coding work in their own interfaces.