A Statusline Is a Tiny Harness
The first exercise I give anyone learning to direct coding agents has no prompt in it at all - it is a status bar. Why sixty lines of PowerShell teach context and harness thinking better than any lecture about either.
Series
A Statusline Is a Tiny Harness
In reading order.
- 3 parts
- ≈ 19 min total
- 3 published
Five Scripts and One Settings Key
The statusline build, end to end - a stdin JSON contract, an entry point that reads once and delegates, a colour-coded session line, git platform routing, and the single settings.json entry that wires it all in.
When the Percentage Looks Wrong
Every confusing statusline behaviour is a lesson about the harness underneath - the token arithmetic that refuses to match, the 300ms debounce, the five-second timeout, and the escape codes that fight back.