Using agents with Silo

Silo recognizes the coding agents you run in your terminals — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Copilot CLI, and Grok — and shows you what each one is doing at a glance.

Two optional setup steps: install a monitoring extension to see agent status in the UI, and use Install in Settings → Agents so Silo can give you the exact command to resume a session later.

Seeing agent activity

Silo detects agents on its own, but drawing the indicators — the activity dots on tabs and workspace rows — is left to an extension on purpose, so you can pick the one that fits how you work, or build your own. agent-monitor is the ready-made option; install it from Browse (or extensions.getsilo.dev). Without a monitoring extension, Silo still tracks your agents — it just doesn't display them.

Resuming after a restart

When you restart your computer, the agent sessions running in your terminals don't come back on their own. Silo remembers what was running where and gives you the command to resume.

Install the session hook for a CLI in Settings → Agents and Silo captures each session's real id, so the command resumes that exact session — even if you had two going in the same folder. Left uninstalled, Silo still reminds you what was running, just without a precise id. It won't guess one it can't stand behind: a wrong resume command is worse than none.

Why Silo installs a hook

Only the agent knows its own session id, so to capture it Silo adds one SessionStart hook to that CLI's config. When a session starts, the hook writes the id to a local file (~/.silo/agent-hooks/) that Silo reads — and that's all it does. Nothing leaves your machine, Silo makes no network calls, and it only ever adds or removes its own entry (marked # silo-managed-agent-hook); your other hooks are never touched. If a settings file exists but isn't valid JSON, Silo refuses to rewrite it — fix or remove the file first.

Exact resume works on macOS and Linux; on Windows, agents are still detected, but exact resume isn't available. The hook runs a small, readable shell script Silo writes to ~/.silo/agent-hooks/track-session.sh — you can open and inspect it, and it needs no interpreter or dependency beyond the shell your agent already runs its hooks with. See the agent system architecture for the design.

Settings → Agents

Each hook-installable CLI has an Install / Uninstall button: without the hook you keep detection and the plain reminder; Install adds Silo's session hook for exact resume. It assumes each CLI's default config location — if you run one somewhere else, Install once and copy the # silo-managed-agent-hook entry into your other config file. Setup details in Settings links to the sections below.

Claude Code

Config	~/.claude/settings.json
Resume	claude --resume <id>

Codex CLI

Config	~/.codex/hooks.json
Resume	codex resume <id>

Codex needs one extra step: it won't run a newly installed hook until you trust it. After Install, open Codex and run /hooks once — the entry shows a Silo session tracking (getsilo.dev) label so you can recognize it. Until you do, exact resume stays off for Codex.

Cursor Agent

Config	~/.cursor/hooks.json
Resume	agent --resume <id>

Cursor's sessionStart hook fires when the first character is typed in the TUI — not at process start, and not waiting for a sent message — so Silo's exact resume id usually appears right after you begin typing.

GitHub Copilot CLI

Config	~/.copilot/hooks/silo-managed-agent-hook.json
Resume	copilot --resume=<id>

Grok

Grok needs no Install. Grok keeps its own live session registry (~/.grok/active_sessions.json), so Silo reads that directly when it sees a Grok terminal and offers grok --resume <id> — no hook to install, nothing to trust. Grok only writes a session after the first character is typed in the TUI (not at process start, and not waiting for Enter/send); Silo watches the registry file so the exact resume command appears then, not only after a reload. (Grok also imports hooks from ~/.claude/settings.json for Claude compatibility; Silo ignores those Claude-tagged events when the foreground process is Grok, so installing Claude's hook does not mislabel Grok terminals.)