Vigil is a tiny macOS menu-bar app for developers who run AI coding agents. Unlike Amphetamine or Caffeine, there's no switch to flip. Vigil detects active Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, aider and other agent sessions and keeps your Mac awake only while they're actually working — even with the lid closed. The moment your agents finish, your Mac sleeps and saves battery.
Close the lid and walk away. Your agent keeps running. When it's done, the Mac sleeps.
Ever started a long agent task, closed the laptop, and come back to find it slept and killed your run? Or left Amphetamine on all night by accident? Vigil fixes both.
Running long agent tasks means babysitting Amphetamine: turn it on before you start, remember to turn it off after. Forget, and your Mac never sleeps. Vigil removes the toggle entirely — it's automatic, and it's accurate.
| Vigil | Amphetamine / Caffeine | KeepingYouAwake | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keeps Mac awake | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Automatic — no manual toggle | ✅ | ❌ | |
| Knows when an AI agent is working | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Reads Claude transcript state (semantic) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Sleeps automatically when agents stop | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Lid-closed mode (battery, no display) | ✅ | ✅ (manual) | ❌ |
Stops redundant caffeinate for you |
✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Fully local, no telemetry | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Price | Free / Pro | Free | Free |
- 🧠 Automatic agent detection. Watches for Claude Code, the Claude VS Code extension, Claude Desktop, and (opt-in) Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, aider, Copilot CLI, Ollama.
- 🎯 Semantic detection for Claude. Reads
~/.claude/projectsto know when a session is mid-turn vs finished — precise even during quiet pauses between tool calls. - 💤 Sleeps when idle. Releases the moment your agents stop, after a short grace period.
- 🔒 Lid-closed mode. Keep agents running with the laptop shut (battery, no external display) — backed by a crash-safe helper that always restores normal sleep.
- 🧹 Cleans up after itself. Finds and stops redundant
caffeinate/ DIY keep-awake scripts so Vigil is the single source of truth. - 👀 Honest status. The menu shows "X of Y agents working", live throughput and CPU.
- 🪶 Tiny & private. Menu-bar only, no Dock icon, no accounts, no network calls.
Download (recommended) — grab the latest Vigil.dmg from
Releases, drag Vigil to Applications,
and launch it. (Until notarized builds land, right-click the app → Open on first run.)
Build from source — needs the Swift toolchain (Xcode or Command Line Tools), no Xcode project required:
git clone https://github.com/botus-ai/vigil.git
cd vigil
./scripts/build.sh
open build/Vigil.appHomebrew cask: coming soon.
Click the menu-bar eye icon:
- Automatic — keep awake only while an AI agent is working (the default).
- Keep Awake / Off — classic manual modes.
- Watch for… — pick which AI tools to track.
- Semantic detection — read Claude transcripts for precise mid-turn detection.
- Keep awake with lid closed — one-time admin approval installs the helper.
- Stop other keep-awake tools — quit redundant
caffeinate/ scripts. - Launch at Login — on by default.
Icons: eye = idle · eye.fill = keeping awake · bolt.fill = force-awake · moon.zzz = off.
Each agent session is evaluated individually (so a crowd of idle/leftover sessions can never falsely keep the Mac awake). A session is working when any of these is true:
- Semantic state (Claude) — its transcript shows it's mid-turn (
stop_reason != end_turn). - API throughput — sustained network traffic, including loopback so agents talking to
a local model server (e.g. ollama on
127.0.0.1) count too. - Subtree CPU — the process and its children are busy (catches long local test/build runs).
To avoid false positives, claude-named background tooling (vault sync, memory daemons,
Vigil's own helper) is excluded, and detection is debounced so a single CPU blip can't pin
the Mac awake.
While any agent works, Vigil holds IOKit power assertions for both system and display
sleep (so the screen doesn't lock on you mid-task), plus a grace period after work stops.
For lid-closed, power assertions don't help — macOS sleeps on lid-close regardless — so
Vigil uses the documented pmset disablesleep flag via a small privileged helper. The app
writes a heartbeat; the helper disables lid-close sleep only while that heartbeat is
fresh, and automatically restores normal sleep within ~30s if Vigil ever stops. Your
Mac can't get stuck awake.
About the lock screen: closing the lid always locks the screen — that's a macOS security feature no app can override. Your agent keeps running; you'll just see the lock screen when you reopen. With the lid open, Vigil keeps the display on so it won't lock while an agent is working.
Everything runs locally. Vigil reads process/network counters (via ps/nettop) and,
optionally, your local Claude transcript state — never their contents. It makes no
network connections of its own. No analytics, no accounts. See PRIVACY.md.
Vigil is free and open source. If it saves your overnight runs, consider supporting it:
- Buy Me a Coffee
- Ko-fi
- ⭐ Star the repo — it genuinely helps others find it.
Issues and PRs welcome. Build with ./scripts/build.sh; Vigil --diagnose prints a
one-shot detection snapshot for debugging.
Built by @degusto_ai. Follow for more AI-dev tooling.
MIT © 2026 botus-ai (@degusto_ai)