Who waits on whom

A crew of coding agents spends part of its time waiting on itself: a reviewer waits for something to review, a producer waits for the review, an agent waits for its human owner's decision. Most of those waits are the work going as planned, a review across vendors on its way. The ones that cost are the long ones, where the agent that owes the next step has stopped. Crew Lens in 2D draws one sprint as a wheel, so a wait that has stalled for days stands out at a glance, and so does the agent who can unblock it.

The crew, sprints and waits on this page are synthetic, made up for this walkthrough. Each kind of wait it shows is real and observable in the crew behind Crew Lens.

Scroll, or use the arrow keys, to step through. The wheel is live: hover an agent, a wait or a work item.

Or watch the videoThe wait, the IOU compass and the nudge that clears it, in 65 seconds with sound.

Each agent has its place on the rim: the human owner, the person in charge, at twelve o'clock, Claude agents to the right, Codex agents to the left. The glass helmet grows with the agent's reasoning effort, and its rim takes the colour of the model's tier. Under the name sit the model and the effort, "Sol 6.1 max" for x2. The arc on the helmet is the context window, filling as the agent's context fills.

The inner circle holds the sprint's work items, one cell each, sized by the lines of code they changed, with their price at API list prices on top. A pulsing green cell is in progress, a dashed one is still open. At the centre, the share of the sprint's plan that is done.

x5 is to review x2's work, and waits for x2 to freeze a version to review. The wait runs from x2, the agent that owes, thick at x2's end, to x5, the agent that waits, through the work item it is about. The pill gives its age: 2 days 19 hours.

The colour runs from mint under an hour through amber and orange to red after three days. A hollow pill means nobody has picked the wait up; frost on it means no progress since. The light along a line moves slower the longer the wait.

Top left, one pie for the whole sprint: a wedge for each agent that owes, sized by the hours its waits have waited, coloured by its oldest wait. Here x2 owes the most.

The needle, and the line under the dial, name the agent to unblock first: the root of the longest chain of waits, an agent that waits on nobody else. Rings inside a wedge count the waits it owes, dashed while one has not been picked up. The middle of the compass switches the wait lines on and off.

x4 asked x5 for a review that needs x2's frozen version first, so x4 waits on x5 and x5 waits on x2. x6 waits on x2 for a version of another work item. Each wait is a separate obligation; the chain says whose move frees the most of them. The compass counts every hour held up downstream of x2, 127 hours across three agents, and brackets the chain's wedges together.

On Tuesday afternoon c1 waited on c2's review while c2 waited on c1's. A loop across two work items shows in amber, with a mark on its longest hop. When a loop holds up more hours than any other chain, the compass says to break it first, and at which agent. When every hop of a loop sits on one work item, it is a deadlock, drawn in red.

Some work needs a human decision. x1 asked the human owner to approve a publication. A wait on a person is gold, and the owner gets a wedge in the compass like any agent.

On Thursday at 09:05 the human owner nudges x2. x2 wakes two minutes later, freezes the first version at 09:40 and the second at 10:05. x5 and x6 review them, both work items converge (the green glow), x4's wait closes at 11:05, and the compass empties.

The replay runs from the record: when each wait opened, who picked it up, when it closed.

Each sprint has a lane on the timeline: its open work, its open waits, and marks for completions, model changes, stalls and the human owner's nudges, each explained on hover. The replay runs at the speed you choose and goes fast over the quiet: a stretch with no activity plays as if it lasted five minutes.

Recorded from the full demo, where the replay is yours to run.

Zoomed out, each project is a cloud and each of its sprints a galaxy in it, sized by its crew and its work, with its wait lines still drawn. Zoom in and the galaxies open into their wheels.

Recorded from the full demo, where every project and sprint can be stepped into. It opens with a personal link.

One IOU compass adds up the waits of every sprint on the map and names the agent that owes the most. A project can be switched off in the list under it, to give the others the room.

The waits come from the crew's record. Version 0.1 of the Crew Record, the open format Crew Lens reads, adds them as data: who waits on whom, over which work item, since when, picked up or not. Chains, loops, deadlocks and the compass are computed from the waits at each moment of the replay, so a harness that writes waits gets all of them.

The Crew Record, version 0.1

Crew Lens is being readied for release. Early adopters get early access when it ships, and a chance to shape it to their needs.

This walkthrough plays a scripted part of the lens. The full 2D lens, on the same demo record, opens with a personal link by email: the atlas to step into any sprint, the replay at your own pace, and the 3D views beside it.

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