A codex session waiting on a background terminal read as plainly idle,
with no "1 background terminal" badge. Codex pins that row above its
composer, and the registry looked for it in the last three non-blank
rows. Codex 0.162.0 added a hint row under the status line at rest
(` ← for agents · ? for shortcuts`), which pushes the chip to FOURTH from
the bottom exactly when the idle probe reads it. Measured live on the
1.36.0 beta with `sleep 600` started as a background terminal: chip,
composer, status line, hint row; the server reported `watching: null`.
While a prompt is typed the hint goes away and the chip is third again.
The codex entry now declares `watchingLines: 4`. The trade is stated in
the entry: with no terminal running, the fourth row from the bottom is
the last transcript row (the last two while typing), which the agent
writes. As before, this is contained by codex having no hooks: a forged
row costs a wrong badge, never a silenced alert.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Codeman maintainer
f3b2080e69