October 13, 2026
OSC 7501: the terminal sees when an agent is waiting for permission instead of guessing
Kitty merged OSC 7501 support into master on Oct 13, 2026: Hashimoto's spec is eight days old, and agent status is already showing up in the terminal tab.
Mitchell Hashimoto
@mitchellh
How OSC 7501 adoption is going: Kitty has implemented the protocol and shows the status in the tab title. Grok Build has shipped support, Codex has merged it. I think in less than a week we'll be almost at the point where the whole industry can throw out its heuristics and get deterministic status updates.
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Until now, the terminal had to guess: it looked for a spinner in the window title and waited for it to stop spinning.
Now the program reports its own state. One escape string via printf, five values: idle, working, done, blocked, error. No SDK, no sockets, no environment variables.
The status travels over the same pty as the program's output, so it gets through over ssh and from inside a container.
Who already ships it. Ghostty merged the protocol on Oct 6, 2026, the day the spec was published. Codex accepted a PR on Oct 9, 2026 and reports idle, working and blocked when it writes to the terminal, including through a multiplexer. Grok Build added support in version 1.0.52 on Oct 11, 2026.
Kitty committed support on Oct 12, 2026, and on Oct 13, 2026 Kovid Goyal closed issue #10638 with the words "now implemented in master". The status is exposed through a new field, tab.program_status, in tab_title_template.
Stable builds are scarce so far. In Kitty, the entry sits in the changelog under 0.50.0, while the latest stable release, 0.49.2, came out on Oct 1, 2026: only a build from master shows the status in the tab. In Codex, the change missed rust-v0.162.1 and lives in the rust-v0.163.0-alpha.8 pre-release from Oct 13, 2026.
The spec was rewritten in public based on feedback from the kitty maintainer: in four days it went from a first revision in a gist to 0.4. The terminfo entry was dropped, it was agreed that an unknown state discards the whole report, and the reply to a query now lists the supported states.
Next milestone: stable releases of Kitty 0.50.0 and Codex 0.163.0.
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