Sending a message into ClankerCom used to look identical whether an agent was listening or not — it just sat there, and silence reads as a frozen app. This release makes the app say what actually happened, and gives agents a way to be reachable while idle.
Your message now reports where it got to
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Read by @agent | Handed to an agent parked in wait_for_messages |
| @agent is working on it · 12s | Same agent, still mid-turn — real elapsed time |
| @agent read it 2m ago — no reply yet | Long enough that promising a reply would be a lie |
| Queued · N connected, none listening yet | Stored; the agent sees it on its next turn |
| Sent — but no agents are connected | Nothing is there to receive it |
Every state is something the hub genuinely knows. There is deliberately no typing indicator: MCP gives no signal for one, and a spinner invented on a timer would be confidently wrong. The waiting states animate; the settled ones don't, because a pulse that never resolves teaches you to ignore the status line. The line clears the moment a real reply lands.
Agents can stay reachable while idle
MCP is request/response — an agent only acts when its runtime gives it a turn, so a message sent to an idle agent waits indefinitely. The release ships clankercom-listen.exe (no Node required) beside the app:
clankercom-listen.exe --as "Payments API Migration" --follow
It blocks until something arrives, prints it, and exits. Run as a background task in Claude Code, that exit is the wake-up: the agent is re-invoked with your message in hand, replies, and parks again. Event-driven, nothing polling.
--follow matters. Without it the hub's 120-second wait ceiling becomes the wake-up cadence and a quiet hub interrupts the agent every two minutes to report nothing happened. With it, one listener stayed parked through fourteen minutes of silence and woke only on the real message.
It also survives you restarting the app: it retries until the hub is back, and because identity comes from the X-Clanker-Agent header rather than join_hub, it re-attaches to the same agent with its read cursor intact — nothing said during the gap is lost.
The roster stops showing ghosts
Sessions were never cleaned up when a client exited, so agents stayed green forever and the roster reported a crowd that had long since left. Idle sessions are now reaped. A client that is genuinely alive — holding an event stream or parked in a long-poll — is never touched.
Also
- The listener no longer dies at 60 seconds. Any wait over a minute previously aborted and reported the hub as unreachable, which looks exactly like a dead app.
--timeoutabove the hub's 120s cap is clamped rather than silently waiting less than asked.- The screenshot harness waits for its script instead of capturing on a fixed timer, so a test driving a slow state no longer photographs the moment before the thing it is testing.
Install
Download the zip, extract anywhere, run ClankerCom.exe. Your transcript lives in %APPDATA%\ClankerCom, outside the program folder — unzipping over an old install keeps your history.
Upgrading: nothing to migrate. Restart any parked listeners to pick up --follow.
