So that's this release. When you come back after 20 minutes away (you can make it 10, 30, 60 or off), the notch opens on a short briefing: decisions still waiting for you first, then anything that failed, then what finished. Each line opens the thing it's about: the replay at that moment, the approval, the ledger. If something is waiting, Allow and Deny are right there, and they go through exactly the same approval path as the peek. Allow is never the default key, so a stray Return can't approve anything. You can also just say "catch me up".

To cover an overnight absence, Aria keeps a small history on your Mac: agent and project names, session titles, tool names and times. Session titles can include the start of your prompt, so I want to be plain about that. It stays on this Mac, it's kept for 7 days, it's never uploaded, and Settings has a button that deletes it. It's listed on the what Aria reads page with everything else.

Two fixes I'm a bit embarrassed about. The permission notice I shipped in 0.1.4 never actually appeared: it was attached to a view SwiftUI never started while nothing was wrong, so the check never ran. It works now. And installing an update while a sheet like What's new was open could leave Aria running, because the quit request was refused. A quit now closes the sheet first.

The biggest gap in the usage counts was the first approval, and on my own Mac the reason turned out to be hooks pointing at a script that no longer existed. You'd only see that by opening Agents. Now the main window tells you when Claude Code's or Codex's hooks are broken and offers Repair, with the same reviewed config change as before.

Smaller things: while you're not using it, the music-reactive orb now draws 24 frames a second instead of 30, and its audio analysis does less work on every buffer. If you opted in to usage counts, they're now also sent the same day when you reach a new setup step, not just once a day, so I can see where setup actually stops.

Paid plans aren't open. Yearly Pro and a founding price for the first 100 people are built and tested, but hidden; during the beta everything is free. Downloads are still invite-only while I finish testing on a second Mac. Known problems are on the known issues page.

I started by measuring. A new script launches a copy of Aria with throwaway data, lets it settle, and fails if idle CPU or memory goes over budget. Idle Aria on my M4 sits at about 0.02% of one core and about 135 MB of memory. That's one Mac on a busy day, so read it as a ballpark, but it's now a gate every release has to pass.

The orb was the obvious cost. It now draws at most 30 frames a second when you aren't hovering or talking to it, and stops completely while the display sleeps, the screen is locked or its window is hidden. When you come back it picks up without a jump. If you turned on the music-reactive orb, it used to refresh a chunk of the app on every audio frame; now it only reads the music level when it actually draws. Same Mac, release build against release build, music playing: about 13% of one core in 0.1.3, about 10.5% now. Better, not done. That mode is still the one heavy thing in Aria, and it's next.

Crash reports are new and off by default. If you turn them on, the next launch after a crash sends one small report: the version, your macOS version, the crash type and where in the code it happened. No names, paths, prompts or anything you typed. Settings shows the exact bytes before anything goes out, and turning it off deletes whatever is waiting. The full list is on the what Aria reads page.

Aria also checks its macOS permissions when it starts. If you switched one off, say Accessibility after a macOS update, the main window tells you which one, what stops working without it, and opens the right pane in System Settings.

Smaller things: Settings shows your plan in one line (during the beta every feature is open), connecting Claude Code or Codex during setup now shows the exact config change first, a failed workspace squash merge restores only the files it touched, and the privacy text in Settings is short with the detail one click away.

Downloads are still invite-only while I finish testing on a second Mac. Known problems are on the known issues page.

I wrote down every way an approval can end and tested each one. Allow, deny, timeout, the agent moving on without you, the agent quitting mid-request, Aria quitting, the Mac sleeping, two agents asking at once, twenty requests in a row. In every case that isn't you pressing Allow, the agent gets no answer and asks in its own terminal like it would without Aria. The full table is in the repo, including which rows I could only run with a test harness and not with a real signed-in agent. Those live rows are still to do.

One real bug came out of this. If an agent stopped waiting, say because you answered in the terminal or the process died, its card could stay in the notch with Allow still showing. Clicking it did nothing harmful, but it was confusing. Now the card clears within two seconds and the notch says the agent is no longer waiting and nothing was allowed.

Connecting an agent is more careful too. Before Aria touches Claude Code's settings or Codex's hooks file, it shows you the exact lines it will add, saves a dated backup next to the file, and checks the file didn't change while you were reading. From the same place you can remove Aria's hooks, repair hooks that point at a script that no longer exists, or put the backup back.

Agents > About now says plainly what Aria can do for each agent. Claude Code and Codex can be approved from the notch. The others show what they're doing, and that's all.

Workspaces got the same treatment. Merging shows the commits and files first and keeps a backup so you can undo it. Cleaning up refuses while there's anything unmerged or unsaved in the folder.

Settings has an About section now, with the version, Check for Updates and these notes. After an update you'll see a short What's new once. And if you use voice, it stays on your Mac by default wherever macOS can recognise speech on-device.

Downloads are still invite-only while I finish testing on a second Mac. Known problems are on the known issues page.

The first approval can be a real one. With Claude Code or Codex connected, setup shows one command to paste into Terminal. It opens your agent in a new, empty temporary folder and asks it to create one small file. When the agent asks for permission, you answer in Aria. Aria doesn't run the command for you. If no agent is connected, you get a practice approval instead, and it's labelled as simulated.

The usage counts switch is now also on the first setup screen, unticked. If you turn it on, Aria sends one more number than before: how far through setup you got, from 1 to 6. That's how I'll find the step where people get stuck. The full list is on the privacy page.

Voice depends on macOS Dictation. When Dictation was off, voice used to fail without saying why. Now Aria tells you, with a button to the setting, and Settings > Voice has a short "I can hear you" check. Voice is optional; everything else works without it.

Tabs with nothing in them now say what they need and give you one button to fix it. Settings has a Redo setup button. Disconnect now checks that no Aria hooks are left before it says it's done.

The updater now starts when Aria launches. In 0.1.0 and 0.1.1 it only woke up after you opened the notch menu.

Known problems are on the known issues page.

Every update is signed twice: by Apple (Developer ID, notarized) and with Aria's own update key. The app refuses an update that fails either check. I tested the path from 0.1.0 to 0.1.1, and then to a deliberate recovery build, on a real Mac before publishing this.

There's now one support address, arushp715@gmail.com, in the Help menu, the notch menu, Settings and the site footer. I aim to reply within one business day.

Settings has a new Privacy section with optional usage counts. It's off by default. If you turn it on, Aria sends five numbers and a random ID you can reset, at most once a day: whether it's installed, whether setup finished, whether an agent got connected, whether you've approved something, and whether you used it that day. No prompts, code, file names, account or device details. Settings shows the exact text before anything is sent. The details are on the privacy page.

Known problems are on the known issues page.

The trouble started when one agent stopped being enough. I’d have Claude Code working on the app in one terminal and Codex fixing something on the website in another, each on its own branch, each happily doing its own thing. Then it was three. Then four. And at some point I noticed that I wasn’t really writing code anymore, and I wasn’t really reviewing it either. I was clicking between terminal tabs to find out who was stuck, who was waiting for me to approve a command, and who was about to change the same file as someone else. The agents had gotten faster. I had become the slow part.

That’s a strange thing to realize about your own workflow. The tools were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, and the work still felt harder than it should have. What I was missing wasn’t a better agent. It was a way to see all of them at once without hunting for them.

So I started looking for a place to put that view, and the obvious answers all felt wrong. Another window is just one more thing to lose behind other windows. A dashboard in the browser is something you have to remember to open, which means you open it after something has already gone wrong. I wanted something I would see without trying, the way you notice the time in the corner of your screen without ever deciding to look at it.

That’s how I ended up at the notch. It’s the one part of a Mac screen that’s always in the same place, that your eyes pass constantly, and that nobody uses for anything. Aria lives there now. When nothing needs you, it’s a small orb that stays out of the way. When an agent is waiting on you, the orb tells you, and the panel that opens out of the notch shows you exactly who and why.

I’m building Aria mostly by myself, between school and research at Cal Poly, with the same agents it’s meant to manage running beside me the whole time. That loop is honestly the best part. Every rough edge I hit in my own day becomes something to fix the next morning, and I’m the first user of every change before anyone else sees it.

This page is where I’ll write about all of it: what ships, what breaks, what I got wrong the first time, and whatever I happen to be thinking about while I build. If you’re trying the beta, or just curious, I’d really like to hear from you. You can email me any time.

As for what you’ll actually get, the heart of Aria is a live view of every agent session you have running, right up in the notch. Each one shows what it’s doing at that moment, so you can tell at a glance whether things are moving or whether something has quietly stalled. When Claude Code or Codex needs permission to run a command, you can approve or deny it straight from the panel instead of digging through terminals to find the one that’s asking. And if you want to nudge an agent in a different direction, you can type to it in plain words from the same place.

The part I’m most excited about is teams. If the people you work with run agents too, Aria shows theirs alongside yours, and it warns you when two agents are about to touch the same files before they collide. That was the moment that convinced me this needed to be multiplayer and not just a personal tool.

Through all of it, your prompts, code, and diffs stay on your Mac. Sharing with a team is something you turn on, not something that happens by default.

There are limits, and I’d rather name them than have you find them. Approvals work with Claude Code and Codex only for now. Aria runs on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later. Anything rough that I know about goes on the known issues page, and I keep it current. Pricing after the beta is on the pricing page, but for now, it’s free.

Moving into the notch fixed almost all of that at once. The notch is always in the same spot, it’s already dead space, and your eyes cross it dozens of times an hour without you noticing. When Aria is collapsed, it’s just a small orb sitting beside it. When an agent needs you, the orb changes, and that’s usually enough to pull your eye up for half a second. Hover or click, and a black panel slides out of the notch with your sessions inside.

Getting that panel right took longer than I expected, and most of the time went into removing things. My early versions tried to show everything: logs, diffs, timelines, a little history of every step each agent had taken. It was basically a full dashboard squeezed into a space the size of a sticky note, and it was exhausting to look at. The version that finally felt right shows much less. Who’s running, who’s waiting on you, and one clear thing you can do about each. Everything else is a click deeper, there when you want it and out of the way when you don’t.

Somewhere in that process, three rules settled in that I now check every screen against. The first is to be calm by default. Only the orb is allowed to glow, and everything else stays quiet until something actually needs you. The second is to be real, not staged. Aria shows real agent names, real commands, and real file names, never a polished fake version of what’s happening. The third is to stay local first, so nothing leaves your Mac unless you decide it should.

None of those rules came from a plan. They came from building the wrong thing a few times and noticing what bothered me about it. I suspect that’s how most of Aria will keep getting made, and I’ll keep writing about it here as it does.

If you’ve ever had Claude Code running in one terminal and Codex in another and lost track of which one was sitting there waiting for an approval, you already know the problem Aria is trying to solve. Agents have gotten good enough that running several at once is normal now. The hard part has quietly shifted from getting them to do the work to keeping track of all of them while they do it.

Aria also works for teams. When the people you work with run agents too, you can see theirs next to yours, and Aria will tell you when two of them are heading for the same files before they step on each other. It’s a small thing until the first time it saves you an afternoon of untangling a merge.

It’s worth saying what Aria isn’t. It isn’t another agent, and it isn’t an editor. It doesn’t write your code for you. It just helps you keep an eye on the things that do, from a corner of your screen you were never using anyway.

If that sounds useful, you can see what Aria does or join the beta. I’ll be writing here as it grows.