Agent Hub

A taskbar popover that asks Claude or Codex? and opens the chosen agent in the project you clicked.

Every Agent Hub launch opens its own Windows Terminal window. Agent Hub keeps 16 dark background tints available, so no two live Claude or Codex sessions share one. Each tab uses the same tint as its terminal background. Closing a session releases its tint automatically.

The terminal title starts as Starting Session. Bare /rename lets Claude or Codex choose an accurate two- or three-word name from the conversation. Use /rename Exact Name when you want to choose it yourself. The same name appears in history and Alt+Tab, with no agent or project suffix, and it never changes again unless you run /rename again.

Pin one shortcut per repo. Click it, a card appears at your cursor with the project's icon and two buttons. Pick one and the agent's terminal opens in that directory, already carrying the bypass flags.

1        Claude Code
2        Codex
Enter    last agent used for this project
Esc      cancel

Install

From npm, in the folder that holds your checkouts:

npx @austencloud/agent-hub

Windows only. Nothing to build first: the package carries the C# sources and the installer compiles them with the .NET Framework compiler already on the machine. Run it from inside a repo and the sibling folder becomes the project root; run it from a folder full of repos and that folder does. Name it yourself with npx @austencloud/agent-hub -ProjectsRoot C:\code.

npx @austencloud/agent-hub uninstall reverses it, -Purge included.

Or from a clone of this repo:

cd <repo>\agent-hub
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\install.ps1

If your other checkouts live somewhere other than this repo's parent folder:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\install.ps1 -ProjectsRoot C:\code

The installer opens %USERPROFILE%\AgentHub when it finishes. Drag the shortcuts onto your taskbar to pin them. That folder and the Start Menu both get a copy; the taskbar is the point.

Re-run it any time. It rebuilds, refreshes shortcuts, and never overwrites a project's existing launchers\start-*.bat.

What it does

1. Verifies Claude's guarded two/three-word bare /rename prompt patch.
2. Installs 16 perceptually spaced dark Windows Terminal background schemes for the current user and signals any running Terminal instance to reload them.
3. Compiles four small executables with the .NET Framework compiler that ships with Windows. No SDK, no npm, no downloads.
4. Installs them to %LOCALAPPDATA%\AgentHub\bin along with the icons.
5. Creates one shortcut per project in %USERPROFILE%\AgentHub and the Start Menu.
6. Writes launchers\start-claude.bat / start-codex.bat into any project that lacks them, so a bare repo still launches.
7. Registers the host to start at logon and starts it now.

Options

| Flag | Effect | |---|---| | -ProjectsRoot <dir> | Where your checkouts live. Default: this repo's parent. | | -NoAutoDiscover | Only install projects listed in projects.json. | | -NoLaunchers | Don't create start-*.bat in projects that lack them. | | -NoStartup | Don't register the host to run at logon. | | -NoOpen | Don't open the shortcut folder at the end. |

Projects come from projects.json plus, unless -NoAutoDiscover is passed, any sibling folder under ProjectsRoot that contains a .git directory. Entries whose path doesn't exist are skipped silently, so one projects.json works across machines that have different subsets cloned.

To add an icon for a project, drop a .ico into agent-hub/icons/ and name it in projects.json (auto-discovered projects look for <folder-name>.ico).

Uninstall

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\uninstall.ps1

Stops the host, removes the install folder, shortcuts, and the logon entry. Your repos' launchers\start-*.bat files are left alone. Add -Purge to also forget the remembered per-project agent. Taskbar pins have to be unpinned by hand.

How it works

Four executables split the popover and terminal lifecycles:

• AgentChooserStub.exe is what the shortcut launches. It does nothing but write project|name|icon to a named pipe and exit, so it starts in tens of milliseconds.
• AgentChooserHost.exe is resident. At logon it builds the WPF window off-screen, warms the fonts and layout, then waits on the pipe. On a ping it positions the pre-built card at your cursor and shows it. Selection hides the window rather than closing it, so the second click is as fast as the first.
• AgentTerminalLauncher.exe claims the first free tint, then opens a new Windows Terminal window with that background scheme.
• AgentTerminalSession.exe runs inside the new window and holds the named tint lease until the agent exits. Windows releases the lease if the terminal is closed forcefully.

If the host isn't running when you click, the stub cold-starts it and passes the arguments through, so a shortcut always works.

State lives in %LOCALAPPDATA%\AgentHub:

| File | Purpose | |---|---| | last.ini | Per-project last agent, used for the Enter shortcut and the default highlight. | | debug.flag | Create this empty file to turn on verbose logging to host.log. | | launch-errors.log | Terminal startup failures, written only when a launch fails. |

The Windows Terminal schemes live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows Terminal\Fragments\AgentHub. The uninstaller removes that fragment with the rest of Agent Hub.

Launching an agent opens wt.exe -w new and runs <project>\launchers\start-<agent>.bat inside it. Each repo owns that file, so a project can customize how its agent starts (extra env, a wrapper binary, a status line) without touching agent-hub. If the bat is missing, the session host runs claude or codex from PATH.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when I click a pin. Check whether the host is alive:

Get-Process AgentChooserHost

If it's missing, start it: %LOCALAPPDATA%\AgentHub\bin\AgentChooserHost.exe. For details, create the debug flag and click again:

New-Item -ItemType File "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AgentHub\debug.flag" -Force
Get-Content "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AgentHub\host.log" -Tail 30

The build fails with "csc.exe not found". Enable the .NET Framework 4.x feature in Windows Features and re-run.

The popover animation plays twice. Known behavior when clicking a pin while the popover is already open: the click's mousedown hides it, then the same click's ping reopens it. See KNOWN-ISSUES.md.

The agent window does not open or has no distinct background. Re-run the installer, then open a new Agent Hub session. Confirm that all four executables exist in %LOCALAPPDATA%\AgentHub\bin, then check %LOCALAPPDATA%\AgentHub\launch-errors.log.

Source layout

agent-hub/
  install.ps1        build + install + shortcuts + logon entry
  uninstall.ps1
  bootstrap.ps1      download this folder from GitHub, then install
  package.json       published as @austencloud/agent-hub
  bin/agent-hub.js   npm entry point; resolves ProjectsRoot, calls install.ps1
  projects.json      project list (path, display name, icon)
  src/               C# sources for the four executables
  icons/             project icons
  templates/         start-claude.bat / start-codex.bat written into bare repos
  KNOWN-ISSUES.md

Publishing: cd agent-hub && npm publish. files in package.json is the allowlist, so diag/ and hooks/ stay out of the tarball.

The C# targets the .NET Framework compiler, which means C# 5 only: no ?., no string interpolation, no local functions, no expression-bodied members. The sources carry a UTF-8 BOM because csc assumes the ANSI codepage without one and the card contains non-ASCII text. Keep both constraints in mind when editing.