CLED

Claude/Codex LED — an ambient daemon that turns your keyboard into a live status panel for your AI coding agents (and your machine), driven by OpenRGB.

CLED maps your running agent sessions onto the keys: glance down and see, by color, which of your Claude Code / Codex sessions is working, which is waiting on you, and how hard your machine is breathing — without alt-tabbing to check.

Live demo & install →
_{Demo video made with /brag}

What you see

 F1 ─────────────── F12      RAM usage, fills left → right
 1  2  3  4 ... 9            one slot per agent tab in the focused iTerm2 window
                            ┌ red    = busy   (mid-turn, working)
                            ├ green  = idle   (waiting for you)
                            ├ amber  = stale  (idle > 20 min)
                            └ blue   = other  (tab isn't a recognized agent)
 Numpad 0–9                  per-core CPU load, green → yellow → red
 Enter                       rainbow heartbeat (the daemon is alive)
 everything else             dim

Requirements

• A keyboard with LEDs!
• macOS. Agent detection reads the focused iTerm2 window via AppleScript, so iTerm2 + macOS are assumed.
• OpenRGB installed (the app). CLED talks to its server on 127.0.0.1:6742 and launches it for you if it isn't running.
• Python ≥ 3.11, managed with uv.
• An OpenRGB-supported RGB keyboard. Developed against a Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 SE (Direct mode, 116 LEDs); key regions are addressed by OpenRGB LED name, so it generalizes to other boards where those names match.

Install & run

CLED is on PyPI, so the quickest path — no clone — is with uv:

uvx cled              # fetch and run in one step, nothing installed

For a persistent cled command on your PATH:

uv tool install cled
cled

In Claude Code? Install the plugin and let your agent do the setup — it checks your machine (OpenRGB, a controllable keyboard, iTerm2) and launches the daemon in its own window:

/plugin marketplace add latent-spaces/cled
/plugin install cled@cled

Then invoke it with /cled. The plugin is a thin launcher around the same uvx cled, so the PyPI package above stays the single source of truth.

Or run from a clone, handy if you want to hack on it (see Make it yours below):

git clone https://github.com/latent-spaces/cled
cd cled
uv run cled

However you start it, the daemon connects to OpenRGB if it's already up, and otherwise starts the server itself. Press Ctrl-C to quit (the OpenRGB server is left running).

macOS, no root

On macOS, OpenRGB can drive the keyboard as a plain user — no sudo, no Input Monitoring grant — but only when the server runs inside your GUI/Aqua session. CLED relies on this: it self-heals the server with

open -a OpenRGB --args --server --noautoconnect

which is the launch context that has HID access. The catch: start CLED from a terminal in your normal desktop session. Running under sudo (or from a non-GUI/CLI-orphan context) sees zero devices, and also breaks agent detection — Path.home() and iTerm2 automation both need your user session.

How it works

File	Role
rgb.py	OpenRGB client + render loop (RGBSession). Self-heals: reconnects on connection errors, and refreshes the server when it detects a wake-from-sleep (a >60s wall-clock gap between frames means the HID handle went stale).
agent_tabs.py	Watches tabs in the focused iTerm2 window (osascript + ps) and maps each to a status — Claude Code reads its session JSONL, Codex reads its rollout state — to tell busy from idle.
cled.py	The daemon. Composes each frame (agents + CPU + RAM + heartbeat) and runs the loop at 10 fps.

Make it yours

CLED is deliberately small and self-contained — three short modules, the Python standard library, and two dependencies (openrgb-python, psutil). There's no framework and no hidden machinery; the whole thing fits in one sitting.

So fork it and bend it to your setup — a different key layout, your own status colors, a provider for another agent or terminal. Each behavior lives in a few small, obvious functions. Just ask Claude to change the behavior you want.