Does Gemini CLI Tell You When It's Done?
Gemini CLI doesn't ship a light on your desk, nothing does, on its own. The Status Light is a three-lens desk unit (red, amber, green) that shows at a glance whether a long-running task is still going, stuck waiting on you, or finished, once you've told it how to read your agent's state. It solves a habit rather than a missing feature: switching away from a long Gemini CLI run and then breaking concentration every minute or so to check the terminal.
What the three lights are for
The device is three independently addressable lamps, and nothing forces a particular meaning onto them. The common convention, red for running, amber for waiting on your input, green for a clean finish, maps naturally onto the states any terminal agent moves through during a session, Gemini CLI included, but you assign that mapping yourself.
What a session actually looks like with it
Wire the hook so red lights while Gemini CLI is working, amber if the agent stops to ask a question, and green once a run finishes cleanly. From across the room, that's a status update without opening a terminal window at all, a colour change is enough to know whether you can safely keep working on something else or need to go make a decision.
How much setup does it actually need?
More than plugging it in. The Status Light is hardware plus the manufacturer's utility, not a finished integration with any specific agent, there's no out-of-the-box "Gemini CLI mode." Getting from a device that lights up to a device that reflects your current run means writing a small hook that fires when a task starts and when it ends, typically a few lines, and pointing it at the light's utility. The manufacturer's utility runs on Windows and macOS, so whichever machine you write that hook on, the light should be reachable from it directly. That's a one-time setup cost, not a recurring one.
Is the peripheral vision actually worth it?
Count how many times in a typical Gemini CLI session you alt-tab back to the terminal just to see if it's still running. If that number is more than a handful per hour, each check is a small context switch away from whatever you moved to instead, a small tax per check that adds up over a day of runs that each take several minutes to finish. The light's entire value is replacing that check with a glance you make without breaking focus on what you're actually doing.
Who should wait on this one
If no configuration at all is the bar you're setting, don't buy this yet. It genuinely is hardware plus a utility you have to wire up yourself, and if you want something that recognizes your agent automatically out of the box, you'll be disappointed with this generation, wait for a later revision instead of buying it now and being annoyed you have to write the glue code. If you're comfortable owning that one-time setup, it does exactly what it says.
Compare it against the screen-based alternative in our Desk Terminal guide, see full specs on the Status Light product page, or browse every Gemini CLI hardware guide.