Monitor coding agent progress with periodic reports

The author uses Codex as a hands-off monitor that sends plain-language progress reports every 30 minutes on an implementation agent and can pass messages directly to another agent.

Done withCXCodex

What they did

The author keeps their implementation work in a separate Codex task and sets up another task as a progress monitor. That monitor is scheduled to check in every 30 minutes, send plain-language summaries of what the implementation agent is doing, say whether steering is needed, and, if so, pass a steering prompt directly to the other task via task-to-task messaging instead of making the person interrupt the main worker.

How it went

It helped the author stay hands-off and avoid derailing the implementation agent with constant interruptions. In comments, they say the setup also reduces copy-pasting, but they give no hard performance numbers and note context management is still a constant struggle.

Worth knowing

The main catch they mention is context bloat: split work too finely and agents waste effort on handoffs; keep tasks too large and they start forgetting earlier rules.

Source: Reddit · Undated