DOCS / WORKSPACES
Monitor status & usage
The right-hand properties panel is the workspace’s dashboard: what the agent is doing right now, how much context and quota it has burned, whether its branch has a PR, and the metadata you need when something goes sideways. This page decodes every card. The panel (header WORKSPACE PROPERTIES) can be collapsed to a thin rail and back with its show/hide toggle.
Agent status throughout Birch is push-based: it arrives from hooks installed by the birch-status plugin, so install that first — without it the status, effort, and live-usage data stay empty. (The AGENT SESSION card’s session id and Resume button work regardless: they are read from the agent CLI’s own session store, not from hooks.) See also AI in Birch.
Status card
Section titled “Status card”The top card shows the agent’s brand mark and a Agent · Status line, the time of
its last activity, and a context-usage bar. The status values are:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Working… | The agent is actively running a turn |
| Waiting for your input | It asked a question or hit a permission prompt — amber, and mirrored everywhere attention surfaces |
| Ready for your input | The session is up and idle at its prompt (typical right after opening or resuming a workspace) |
| Done | The turn finished |
| No active session | No live agent in this workspace |
Primary actions and changed files
Section titled “Primary actions and changed files”Below the status card sit the two primary actions — Review changes (jumps to the
Git tab’s Review view) and Create PR (or, once
a PR exists, a live PR button) — plus a changed-files card reading
{N} files vs {base}, which also opens Review.
CLAUDE CODE usage card
Section titled “CLAUDE CODE usage card”For Claude workspaces, the CLAUDE CODE card reports the live session:
| Row | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Model | The model the session is running |
| Effort | The session’s effort level |
| Context | Context-window usage |
| Tokens | Token totals for the session |
| Cache | Cache-read totals |
| 5h limit | Usage of the 5-hour rate-limit window |
| 7d limit | Usage of the weekly rate-limit window |
Task and pull request cards
Section titled “Task and pull request cards”- TASK — shown when the workspace was started from an Inbox task; click to open the task in the browser.
- PULL REQUEST — the branch’s PR with a state pill, a CI-checks chip (hover for
details), and the target branch (
→ main). The chip is refreshed when you enter the workspace and after a successful push, throttled to about one provider call per branch per 30 seconds — and it is never blanked when offline: a failed or empty refresh leaves the last known state in place rather than pretending the PR vanished.
Branch, workspace, and session cards
Section titled “Branch, workspace, and session cards”- BRANCH — the branch name (with a copy button), its base branch, a Sync row of commits ahead ↑ / behind ↓ the upstream, and the changed-file count vs base.
- WORKSPACE — the worktree Path (click to open the folder, copy button beside it) and when the workspace was Created.
- AGENT SESSION — the agent’s session id (with copy) and a Resume button: “Continue this session in the workspace terminal”. See Resume & restart.
Where status also surfaces
Section titled “Where status also surfaces”The same status vocabulary appears everywhere a workspace is drawn:
- Sidebar rows — the agent’s brand mark plus a small status glyph (spinner = working, amber = waiting, check = done). Entering the workspace acknowledges a finished turn’s indicator.
- Collapsed rail — the top five workspaces with a live session.
- Repositories dashboard — waiting workspaces appear in the needs-attention list.
- Inbox — a waiting agent gets its own row (and optional sound and desktop toast; see Notifications).