Stop Alt-Tabbing to Check Your Terminal
The compulsive alt-tab happens because the only place your agent's status lives is behind a window you have already switched away from. The fix is not willpower, it is moving that status somewhere visible without switching anything - a light, or a small screen, sitting in your peripheral vision.
Why checking breaks concentration in the first place
Long agent runs create a specific bad habit: you switch to something else, then interrupt yourself every ninety seconds or so to see whether the run finished. Every one of those checks costs you a re-entry into whatever you switched to, whether or not the answer changed.
A light versus a small screen
The Status Light is a literal three-lens traffic signal - red, amber, green - free-standing, USB-C powered, and you assign the mapping yourself since nothing forces red to mean anything in particular. It is not automatic; you write a short start-and-stop hook once and it keeps working after that.
The Desk Terminal takes a different shape: a palm-sized retro-styled computer with a small colour LCD and a status indicator bar, networked over Wi-Fi, that can show a clock, weather, or a build and deploy status - the stock firmware ships with clock and status faces already built in. One flag worth knowing before you buy: the stock firmware is the manufacturer's, and some of its setup menus are in Chinese, though everything it displays day to day is language-neutral.
Is this actually the fix, or is it a workaround
An ambient indicator does not make your agent finish faster, and it does not replace actually reading the output when it is done - it only removes the wasted trips where you check and the answer is still 'running.' If your agent runs finish in under the time it takes to glance at a taskbar clock, or you only ever run one short task at a time, you likely do not have the problem this solves yet.
It is worth it once you notice you are interrupting deep work every couple of minutes purely to check a status that has not changed. Count how many of those checks over a day come back 'still running' versus 'done' - if it is mostly the former, an ambient light is saving you exactly those wasted glances, nothing more.
For a walkthrough of wiring a status light into a specific agent's session events, see our setup guide for Windsurf, or browse the rest of our ambient status notes.