Blog/Agent view

Claude Code’s agent view: parallel agents, the supervisor, and ServerCC support

2026-07-23

Claude Code 2.1.139 shipped on 2026-05-11. The first changelog entry was “Added agent view (Research Preview)”, with a link to its documentation. I spent most of a day with it on release day. A few parts weren’t finished yet, and it also introduced a resident process called the supervisor.

What agent view is

Run claude agents and you get a dashboard for dispatching multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel on the same repository. Two defaults apply:

  • Worktree isolation by default. Each session gets its own automatically created git worktree, so parallel runs never fight over the same files.
  • Sessions run as bg sessions. They are owned by a separate supervisor process instead of your terminal. Close the terminal, or the dashboard itself, and they keep working.

The supervisor process

Run ps while a bg session is active and you’ll find a claude daemon run --spawned-by … process with a PPID of 1. Roll back to 2.1.138 and it’s gone. It spawns the first time you use claude agents, claude --bg, or the /bg command.

Before this, a Claude Code session ended when its terminal did. Now a resident process owns the sessions. With remote control enabled for all sessions, bg sessions dispatched from agent view also show up in the Claude mobile app, and you can continue the conversation there. The app can’t start new sessions on your machine yet. Agent view also covers much of what Conductor-style multi-agent frontends do, inside the CLI.

Issues in the research preview

These are from the early builds, and some may have improved since. Three things got in the way repeatedly:

  • No branch status. Every session gets a worktree, but the session list doesn’t show whether a branch is merged, mergeable, or conflicting. I kept leaving agent view to run git commands and check.
  • No per-project filter. The dashboard lists every bg session for your user across all projects. After using it in three repos, sessions from all three were mixed together in one list.
  • No permission mode at dispatch. You can’t pick a permission mode when starting a session from the dashboard. The workaround is to launch with claude --bg or /bg, which accept the mode as usual. The session then shows up in agent view.

It also shipped enabled by default in a point release. You set an environment variable to turn it off, while most experimental Claude Code features have been opt-in. For a research preview, the rollout felt a bit hurried.

ServerCC support

ServerCC is our iOS client for running Claude Code on your own server over SSH. It supports agent view and bg sessions, and its worktree tools show the branch information agent view leaves out:

  • A dashboard scoped to the workspace. Opening Agent View from a workspace launches claude agents --cwd <workspace>. The stock dashboard has no per-project filter; this one shows only that project’s sessions. A key row above the keyboard (Space to peek, → to open, Close, Pin) lets you drive it by touch.
  • bg sessions in session history. Supervisor-managed sessions carry a lowercase bg badge, colored by state: working, done, failed. Tap one to re-enter it via claude attach with the conversation intact. In the Running list, bg and tmux sessions have different tags, and after a connection drop ServerCC reattaches automatically.
  • Branch status in the worktree list. Each row in the worktree list shows whether there are uncommitted changes, how many commits it is ahead or behind, and a merge status: Ready to Merge, Merge Conflict (from a dry-run check), or Merged, which is detected even after squash and rebase merges. These are the things I kept leaving agent view to check.
  • Worktree operations on the phone. Create a worktree from a base branch, open a session inside one, swipe to merge (cleanup is automatic on success; conflicts abort back to a clean state), swipe to delete. The worktree picker in Git Diff switches between the changes each parallel instance made.

Dispatching from the dashboard still can’t set a permission mode. This is an upstream limit: claude agents rejects --permission-mode. When the mode matters, start a regular ServerCC session with the permission-mode picker and keep it alive in a persistent tmux session.

The Agent View entry in ServerCC requires Claude Code 2.1.141 or newer on the server; on older versions the row is disabled with a hint.

The full mobile setup is in Claude Code on iPhone. Agent View details are in the Agent View docs.