Per-task CPU and memory for your running Kandev agents. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc (⌘+Shift+Esc on macOS) and see which task is actually eating the machine.
A busy Kandev instance runs a dozen agents at once. When the fans spin up, the
host's own process list tells you that node is busy — not which task asked
for it. This measures the machine and attributes every process back to the
Kandev task that spawned it.
Expand a task to see the processes it owns: the agent, its tool calls, and anything they started in turn.
- CPU as a live rate, where 100% is one core — the
top/htopconvention. A task pegging one core reads 100%, not 6% of a 16-core box. The bar turns red past a full core. - A sparkline of roughly the last 30 seconds, so you can tell a steady load from a spike.
- Memory, summed over the task's whole process tree.
- Idle tasks folded away. Most agents sit at zero waiting on a reply; listing twenty of them buries the one doing work. Anything under 1% CPU collapses into a single row you can expand.
Filter by task title, process name, command line or PID. Click Open to jump to the task.
Kandev exports KANDEV_TASK_ID and KANDEV_SESSION_ID into every agent's
environment, and every process the agent spawns inherits it. So attribution is
exact rather than guesswork:
- A process that declares
KANDEV_TASK_IDin its own environment belongs to that task. - Otherwise it inherits its parent's attribution — which is what covers a tool
call that scrubbed its environment (
env -i make).
Ancestry is used only as the fallback, because a process's own declaration is the ground truth. That ordering matters: the other way round, a process that deliberately re-declares the variable gets silently charged to whichever task happened to spawn it.
This is also why a dev server that outlived its shell still shows up. Being
re-parented to init severs it from the tree, but it kept the inherited
environment, so it is still attributed correctly.
Note that /proc/<pid>/environ reflects the environment a process was given at
exec time. A process cannot unset its way out of attribution afterwards.
| Platform | Process table | CPU | Memory | Environment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux | /proc |
utime+stime delta |
PSS via smaps_rollup, falling back to RSS |
/proc/<pid>/environ |
| macOS | ps |
TIME delta (centisecond resolution) |
RSS | sysctl KERN_PROCARGS2 |
| Windows | Toolhelp32 | GetProcessTimes |
Working set | PEB via ReadProcessMemory |
Memory marked with * is RSS, which counts pages shared between a parent and
its children in every process, so a tree total reads high. Linux reports PSS
where it can, which splits shared pages proportionally and can be summed
honestly.
Windows is untested. It compiles and its parsers are unit-tested, but the syscall path has never been run on a Windows machine. It fails soft: if the PEB read is refused, a process inherits its parent's attribution rather than crashing. Reports welcome.
Download the tarball from Releases, then either:
- Settings → Plugins → Install and upload it, or
- drop it in
~/.kandev/plugins/and press Sync.
The hotkey is remappable in Settings → Plugins → Task Manager. A CPU chip also appears in the top bar on the Kanban and Tasks views, and opens the same panel.
The plugin requests api_read: tasks to show task titles. Its usage webhook
requires an authenticated host session. The manifest keeps plugin API v1 and
does not set min_kandev_version. A host with host.ui.Action shows a CPU
icon and percentage. An older compatible host keeps the current chip and its
meter.
The top-bar chip polls every 4 seconds while its component is mounted. The panel polls every 1.2 seconds while it is open.
A warm poll costs about 30 ms on a machine running 24 tasks across 748
processes — essentially the cost of one /proc scan. Reading PSS for every
attributed process costs an order of magnitude more (~370 ms), so memory is
refreshed on its own slower cadence and reused in between. CPU percentages come
from a delta of cumulative CPU time across a 700 ms window, never from a
lifetime average like ps %cpu, which would report an agent that was busy an
hour ago as busy now.
Use Go 1.26 and Node.js 24. The UI is plain JavaScript. Node's built-in test runner checks its host Action and legacy paths.
Clone the Kandev SDK beside this repository at the pinned source revision:
git clone https://github.com/kdlbs/kandev.git ../kandev
git -C ../kandev checkout "$(cat .kandev-sdk-ref)"The Go SDK is not a separate module. go.mod reads it from
../kandev/apps/backend. The source pin is not a minimum host version.
Run the main checks and builds from this directory:
make check-format
make vet
make test
make build
make verify-package-host
make verify-packagemake test runs Go tests, UI contract tests, negative package and release
checks, and the static-server and loopback tests for the browser harness.
make verify-package-host builds and checks one platform. The full package
command cross-compiles every platform in manifest.yaml, then checks the file
list and SHA-256 checksums.
The release workflow runs from main. It selects a version bump, checks the
candidate, and builds the full package before it commits a version or tag. A
pushed v* tag must match manifest.yaml, the Makefile, and the package.
The browser harness uses fake task and process data. Install its locked test dependencies, then run its layout and ordering checks:
npm ci --prefix .harness
npx --prefix .harness playwright install chromium
make test-harnessFor host review, build the package and upload it to an isolated local Kandev
host. Route the usage request to synthetic data, then run the desktop and mobile
checks. HOST_ACTION=1 checks the Action path. HOST_ACTION=0 checks the legacy
path. Use a host that includes the Action API for mode 1, or a pre-Action API v1
host for mode 0. Keep the host's home directory, database, and temporary files
inside a task-owned disposable directory.
make verify-package-host
KANDEV_URL=http://127.0.0.1:18080 \
PACKAGE_FILE="$(make package-file)" \
HOST_ACTION=1 make smoke-packageThe rendered-host check covers accessible keyboard activation and the registered shortcut, mobile touch size and fit, usage polling, and disable/re-enable behavior. It validates only the selected package and host version; the layout fixture alone does not certify host compatibility. This repository does not set a minimum host version.
The live process diagnostic is optional. It samples the machine where it runs:
make liveMIT — see LICENSE.