Nobody has named this yet: the agent status glance

A behavior keeps showing up that doesn't have a name. As agents move to the background — cloud tasks, long-running sessions, browser agents on another desktop — every product suddenly needs a way to answer "what is my agent doing?" without the human opening anything.

The shapes so far: menu-bar glyphs that pulse while an agent works. Task badges with step counts. Push notifications that fire only on blocked-state, not on progress. Each one is a peripheral-vision answer to a foreground question.

This is exactly the situation the Watching list exists for. We're calling it ambient status for now — name the behavior, not the technology — and collecting sightings. Three or more from two independent vendors and it gets a page; the promotion bar is documented in the methodology.

If you've seen a product solve this in a way we haven't catalogued, that's precisely what reader submissions are for.