AgentStep — A human-readable progress line for coding agents

Turn coding agents' deep-work mode from a black box into a readable step-by-step feed

Problem

Senior engineers complain that with latest coding models, the agent enters deep-work mode, runs obscure commands, and they have no idea what it's up to. They wait for results with low trust. Current UIs don't translate agent steps into plain language.

Solution

A lightweight plugin or terminal wrapper that parses each shell command and description the agent emits, draws a one-line human summary above the prompt, and keeps a scrollable step history. Users see what the agent is doing and why, and can quickly locate failed steps.

Users

Indie developers, tech leads, and engineers using coding agents like Claude Code or Codex, especially those integrating agents into team workflows

MVP

Parse agent commands and description fields to generate one-line summaries; keep last N steps scrollable; template common command patterns (git, test, install); run as a CLI plugin or terminal status line; export step logs for review

Revenue

Open-source core plugin; subscription for advanced features like shared team step history, failure pattern analysis, and multi-agent comparison

Why now

Coding agents are moving from completion to autonomous execution, but observability tools lag behind. An indie dev can build a plugin cheaply by parsing existing agent hooks and outputs without training models.