My AI Agents Lie About Their Status, So I Built a Hidden Monitor

Short version:I tried to get my Claude Cowork agents to self-report their status to a dashboard. They wouldn't. The fix was using Cowork's hook system to monitor them at the infrastructure level, bypassing agent judgment entirely.

Happy to answer questions about the setup. I'm still unsure about the right task counter threshold for restarting sessions. Also, I'm trying to find a way to get the agents to indicate on my dashboard when they're "stuck" and waiting for something like access approval. The Claude Desktop app clearly knows when this happens (indicates it with a blue circle) but I haven't found a way to get the information into my dashboard.

But who monitors the monitor?!