Cate unifies six coding-agent CLIs into one observable event stream
Grobiani · reddit · 2026-07-22
Problem
When running several coding agents at once, the team behind Cate needed to tell three states apart: working, waiting for permission/input, and finished. Process monitoring was too weak, and parsing terminal output was too brittle.
Approach
They mapped the native hooks from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok, OpenCode, and Pi into a single event stream instead of wrapping or scraping processes.
Notable limitation
- Cursor cannot distinguish a command that is about to run from one that is blocked waiting for approval.
- The system therefore avoids guessing when the signal is ambiguous.
Extra engineering details
The write-up also covers:
- session resume
- stale-session handling
- how the unified lifecycle stream is implemented
The author says they would like to see a common lifecycle protocol across coding-agent CLIs.
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