claude agents: Manage Multiple Background Tasks at a Glance

Have you ever felt it's a waste to assign just one big task and sit there waiting? You want to run several things at once, but then "which finished and which is still running" gets confusing. There's a command that gathers that progress onto one screen.

Definition (What It Is)

claude agents is a command for viewing and managing, at a glance, multiple sessions running in the background (background = a state of running separately behind the scenes). This screen is called the agent view (session = one unit of work in progress with Claude). You can check which tasks are running and which have finished, all gathered together.

How to Use It (By Difficulty)

Before you start: This command is meaningful "when you're running several tasks at once." You need tasks running in the background for anything to show up in the list. At first the list may be empty, and that's normal.

Basic — View the list

claude agents

When you run it, running tasks and completed tasks appear as a list. You can check each task's status (whether it's in progress or done) on one screen.

Applied — Output as JSON for scripts

claude agents --json

Appending --json outputs the list of currently running (live) sessions in JSON format (a structured data form that's good for programs to exchange). Rather than for a person to view with their eyes, you use it when you want another program to read this info and process it automatically.

Real-World Example

Many people run several tasks in the background and occasionally check the gathered progress with claude agents. Without opening a separate window for each task to peer into one by one, you can check "are they all done?" on one screen.

More Ways to Use It

• Since you can run several things at once, you can assign time-consuming big tasks in parallel (several at once) and do other work.
• The --json output can be connected to other automation tools to, say, send a notification when a task finishes.

Wrap-Up

claude agents is like a "control tower for viewing several tasks at a glance." Run several tasks in the background and check the gathered progress with claude agents, and you can keep big tasks running smoothly in parallel. Be sure to learn it at the point when your concurrent tasks start piling up.

Reference: Claude Code v2.1.154 (2026.05)