Three Lamps or a Screen: Status Light vs. Desk Terminal
The Status Light and the Desk Terminal both exist to answer "is my agent still working?" without you tabbing back to check, but they answer it with different amounts of detail: the Status Light gives you three fixed lamp-states, the Desk Terminal gives you a small screen that can show anything you can push to it. If a glance at three colours is all the information you need, buy the Status Light; if you want more than that, the Desk Terminal does more.
Three colours vs. one small screen
The Status Light is a chunky, matte-black desk unit about the size of a chess piece with three stacked lenses, red, amber, green, each independently addressable. The common mapping is red for running, amber for waiting on you, and green for a clean finish, though nothing forces that mapping; it's just three lamps. The Desk Terminal is a palm-sized, retro-styled mini computer with a small colour LCD and a front status bar, networked over Wi-Fi, that can display a clock, the weather, or a build or deploy status, anything you can push to a small networked screen, not a fixed set of three states.
What "install" means for each
Neither device reads your agent's mind out of the box. The Status Light is hardware plus a utility; mapping it to your agent's actual state is a few lines of glue you write once, typically in a start and stop hook. The Desk Terminal works the same way in spirit, it displays whatever you push to it, which means you decide what that is and write the code that sends it. If you want something that recognises your agent with zero configuration, neither of these is it; wait for a later hardware revision instead of buying either expecting plug-and-play.
Setup and power
Both run off USB-C, and the Status Light needs no bracket, it stands on the desk unaided. The Status Light also comes in a rechargeable Bluetooth variant, but the wired USB-C version is the one we recommend; the battery variant carries a lithium cell that restricts how it ships by air. The Desk Terminal needs Wi-Fi to do anything beyond be a static object, and its stock firmware is the manufacturer's, with some setup-menu text in Chinese, worth knowing before you buy it expecting an English-only experience, even though everything it displays day to day is language-neutral.
The one honest trade-off
The Desk Terminal is a genuinely more capable and, frankly, more photogenic object, a speaker and microphone are built in and it can double as a voice assistant, though most buyers leave it on a status face. But that capability comes with more moving parts: a network connection, a firmware menu you'll partly navigate in Chinese during setup, and more surface area to get wrong. The Status Light does exactly one job, showing three states, and does nothing else, which is the whole appeal if that's genuinely all you want.
Who should buy neither
If you're already glancing at a terminal window or a taskbar icon and that's working fine, an ambient display just adds a second thing to configure and maintain. Buy one of these when switching away from your screen entirely is the habit you're trying to break, not before.
Browse the full comparison hub for the rest of our desk-hardware guides. Setup notes: Status Light for Codex CLI.