Ampel

A native macOS menu bar app that shows at a glance whether any running Claude Code session needs a decision from you. Red means blocked on a permission prompt, yellow means working, green means the turn finished, gray means nothing is running, and several sessions aggregate worst-case. It works off Claude Code’s lifecycle hooks, which drop one JSON file per event into a spool directory the app watches: no local server, no daemon, and nothing in the hook path but /bin/bash. Open source under MIT, installable with Homebrew. Built at Appgineering, the studio I co-founded.