The peek-a-boo agent bar

Running several AI agents at once creates a different problem: how do you supervise all of them without being tied to a single screen. We wanted someone to be able to:

A Workato user can belong to several workspaces — perhaps one for Sales, another for Legal, and another for Finance. Each workspace can contain development, test, and production environments. An agent might therefore be running in a different workspace, environment, and product area from the page the user is currently viewing. If agent activity lived inside a page-level chat panel, people would have to remember where each agent had started and navigate back there to check on it. That would turn parallel work into a monitoring task. We needed an agent layer that belonged to the entire product — not to a single page, workspace, or environment.

An early concept placed an agent-status indicator on the environment switcher. I pushed back on it in review. The switcher answered one question: “Which environment am I viewing?” Agent status answered another: “Does any active work need my attention?” Combining them made both harder to understand. More importantly, the concept still treated an agent as belonging to the user's current environment.

I used our internal product scaffolding and Claude Code to build a rough version of the idea I wanted to discuss with the team. The prototype was not intended to be the final design. It made three principles tangible:

Serene and I explored several placements. One concept used a centered notch, similar to the top of a MacBook screen. It could expand just enough to offer a peek at active agents. We liked the sense that agent activity was always nearby without becoming a permanent panel. But it collided with an existing control in the recipe editor, where people switch between editing and testing. We then tried a full-width bar across the top. It created more room for active agents, but expanding it pushed the product down and competed with navigation that already lived there. Both concepts failed for the same reason: the top of the product was already doing too much.

Serene placed the interaction at the bottom of the viewport. The move resolved several problems at once:

In its resting state, the bar provides a compact view of active agent sessions. It can surface:

People can move among pages, workspaces, and environments without losing track of the agents working for them. When more context is needed, the bar expands into a richer view or opens the complete agent experience. The transition happens only when the user asks for it.