Set up your agents

Alto tells working, needs-you and done apart with no setup, from what the terminal already sees. Agents that have hooks can say it exactly. One command adds them:

alto hooks install          # Claude Code and Codex
alto hooks install claude   # just one
alto hooks status           # which agents have them
alto hooks uninstall        # take them out, leaving your other hooks

The hooks do nothing outside Alto, so they’re safe to leave in place.

What they give you

• Exact state on the tab. A yellow dot the moment Claude Code asks permission, with why (“permission: Bash”), and green the moment it finishes.
• Notifications that say who. “claude needs you: permission: Bash”, for a tab that isn’t in front of you.
• Run again resumes the conversation. After a reboot, an agent’s tab starts it again with its own resume (claude --resume ID, codex resume ID).
• Work panes. With the hooks in, an agent hears when you give it a work pane.

Any other agent

An agent or script can report its own state with alto status:

alto status needs-you --why "permission: deploy" --agent mytool
alto status working
alto status done

Inside a session, $ALTO_SESSION is set, so status knows which session it’s in. See Agent status.