An open-source Vibe Island that lives in your Mac's notch

What it does

Open Island is a native macOS app that camps in your menu bar or MacBook notch, giving you a live dashboard for AI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. It shows session status, surfaces permission requests, and lets you jump back to the exact terminal or IDE tab where an agent is running. Everything stays local on your Mac—no accounts, no telemetry, and no Electron wrapper.

The interesting bit

Instead of a monolithic web app, it uses a lightweight hook CLI that forwards agent events through a Unix socket to a SwiftUI/AppKit bridge. The hooks are designed to fail open: if Open Island isn’t running, your agents keep working uninterrupted. That architecture is unusually respectful of a terminal-native workflow.

Key highlights

• Supports 10 agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and several Claude Code forks) and 15+ terminals/IDEs including Ghostty, tmux, Zellij, Warp, and the JetBrains suite
• Native SwiftUI + AppKit, not an Electron wrapper, with Sparkle auto-updates and signed, notarized DMG releases
• Local-first: no server, no telemetry, no account required; sessions auto-discover from local transcripts and persist across launches
• Fail-open hook integration via Unix socket IPC—agents continue unaffected if the app is closed
• One-click jump-back to specific terminal panes, tmux windows, or IDE workspaces

Caveats

• macOS 14+ only; building from source requires Swift 6.2 and Xcode
• Richer Codex hook events like PreToolUse/PostToolUse are off by default, and file-edit approvals aren’t guaranteed to surface in the UI

Verdict

Worth a look if you run multiple terminal-based AI agents on macOS and want a native, local-first dashboard. Ignore it if you’re not in that niche—it’s unapologetically Mac-only and agent-centric.