Baton Review 2026

A macOS menu bar app that tracks every Claude Code and Codex session on your machine and tells you which AI coding agent is waiting on you right now.

Baton is a free, open-source macOS menu bar app that solves a problem anyone running multiple AI coding agents knows well: once agents do real work unattended, the hard part is no longer doing the work, it is knowing which of your running sessions is waiting on a decision from you. Baton reads the signals your machine already emits, with zero manual entry, and surfaces the one that matters: the session that finished its leg and handed the baton back to you. It watches Claude Code session files in ~/.claude and Codex thread state in ~/.codex using FSEvents, so the menu bar count of sessions waiting on you updates in under a second while staying battery-cheap. The dropdown groups everything by tool (Claude Code and Codex), then by Working and Done. Clicking a Claude session raises its Terminal.app tab; clicking a Codex thread opens it via the codex:// deep link. Waiting detection is tool-aware: for Claude Code, an idle session whose last turn is an assistant answer counts as waiting; for Codex, Baton mirrors the app's own unread blue-dot state. Jumping to a session acknowledges it and clears the count. There is also a dependency-free HTML dashboard served on localhost for a full multi-tab view. Baton is entirely local and strictly read-only over your session directories; nothing leaves your machine. Install is a one-line curl script that sets up an isolated Python venv and a login LaunchAgent. Requires macOS and Python 3.9+, MIT licensed. Baton does not use MCP; it works by passively reading local session state.