✓ Survived Rank 2 of 18 proposedIndie DevTools Oct 28, 2026

Attention manager for engineers running parallel agents

A control plane that batches, schedules and gates interruptions from your coding agents so one human can supervise many without context-switch burnout.

Open the discussion ↗

A ready-to-paste brief for Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent.

I want to build a small, bootstrappable product. Help me plan and start the MVP.

Product: Attention manager for engineers running parallel agents
What it is: A control plane that batches, schedules and gates interruptions from your coding agents so one human can supervise many without context-switch burnout.
Who pays: Senior/staff engineers and eng leads at startups who personally run 3+ concurrent coding agents (Claude Code, Codex); $15–40/mo individual, expensed on the dev-tools budget.
Closest alternatives: Claude Code / Codex native UIs, Cursor background agents, Conductor and similar multi-session wrappers, DIY 'manager agent' prompts
The gap: Existing tools optimize for launching and viewing agents; none manage the human's attention budget — no interruption batching, per-agent question queues, daily scope limits, or enforced review windows. People are hand-rolling coordinator agents because nothing ships this.
Why now: Multi-agent workflows only became mainstream in the last ~12 months as Claude Code/Codex got good enough (commenters date this to Nov 2025), and the resulting overload complaints are surfacing now with no incumbent addressing the supervisor side.
Moat to build toward: Moderate workflow lock-in: personal queue policies, review history, and per-repo agent configs accumulate; integrations across multiple agent CLIs create switching cost the agent vendors themselves won't build (they optimize for more usage, not fewer interruptions).
Biggest risk: Agent vendors (Anthropic, OpenAI) ship native orchestration/coordinator features that make a third-party supervision layer redundant.

First three steps:
1. Build a CLI/TUI that wraps Claude Code and Codex sessions, queues each agent's questions/approvals into a single prioritized inbox
2. Add scheduled review windows: notifications from agents are batched and delivered at set times instead of interrupting
3. Add a daily plan file the tool enforces — starting an agent on an unplanned task requires an explicit override with a written reason

Start by asking me up to five questions about constraints (stack, budget, timeline), then propose the smallest version a paying customer would use, and scaffold it.

Overall6.1/10

Pain7

Willingness to pay5

Timing8

Gap6

Moat4

Feasibility7

For

Who pays

Senior/staff engineers and eng leads at startups who personally run 3+ concurrent coding agents (Claude Code, Codex); $15–40/mo individual, expensed on the dev-tools budget.

What people said · 4

The author describes running several agents at once where each needs intermittent human input, and the constant context reloading across repos and decisions is the new source of exhaustion. From the article ↗
A commenter says the 'every agent needs me sometimes' pattern kills flow and causes burnout, and their fix was hand-building a hierarchy of coordinator agents to talk to instead. Read the comment ↗
Another commenter describes adding a homemade manager agent in front when parallel agent work becomes too much to handle. Read the comment ↗
A commenter copes by enforcing a pre-planned daily task list and requiring an offline planning session before allowing any side quests, showing demand for scope discipline tooling. Read the comment ↗

Paraphrased from the discussion. Follow the links for the original comments.

Competitors and gap

Claude Code / Codex native UIsCursor background agentsConductor and similar multi-session wrappersDIY 'manager agent' prompts

Existing tools optimize for launching and viewing agents; none manage the human's attention budget — no interruption batching, per-agent question queues, daily scope limits, or enforced review windows. People are hand-rolling coordinator agents because nothing ships this.

Why now

Multi-agent workflows only became mainstream in the last ~12 months as Claude Code/Codex got good enough (commenters date this to Nov 2025), and the resulting overload complaints are surfacing now with no incumbent addressing the supervisor side.

Moat · 4/10

Moderate workflow lock-in: personal queue policies, review history, and per-repo agent configs accumulate; integrations across multiple agent CLIs create switching cost the agent vendors themselves won't build (they optimize for more usage, not fewer interruptions).

Against

Red team: Users are demonstrably hand-rolling coordinator agents to solve interruption overload, agent vendors are structurally disincentivized to reduce human interruptions, and a cross-agent attention layer is a real gap that opened in the last year.
What would kill it: Agent vendors (Anthropic, OpenAI) ship native orchestration/coordinator features that make a third-party supervision layer redundant.

Start

First three steps: Build a CLI/TUI that wraps Claude Code and Codex sessions, queues each agent's questions/approvals into a single prioritized inbox
Add scheduled review windows: notifications from agents are batched and delivered at set times instead of interrupting
Add a daily plan file the tool enforces — starting an agent on an unplanned task requires an explicit override with a written reason
Source discussion: AI promised less work. I've never worked more ↗ 657 points650 commentsFrom the commentsLinked article

For

Against

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