Run a dozen Claude Code agents and you lose the thread — which one needs you, which one quietly failed, which two are editing the same file. Tower is a Mac menu bar app and terminal dashboard that watches every agent, mirrors your real plan usage, pins Claude to a country, and tells you the truth about your connection.
$ curl -fsSL https://ghhrmnzdh.github.io/tower/install.sh | sh
Nothing surfaces. You tab through terminals hunting for the one that stopped — and you find it late, if at all.what you get today · silence
Claude stops mid-turn. Your Wi-Fi? A slow hotel network? Anthropic having a moment? You alt-tab to a speed test and guess.what you get today · API Error (500)
Your location drifts mid-session. The request comes back looking like broken auth instead of simply waiting for you to be back on-country.what you get today · Please run /login
How much of your plan is gone? Local token math is a guess. You find out for real when you hit the wall, mid-task.what you get today · a guess
One background process holds all the logic and state. Everything you see — in the menu bar or in the terminal — is a thin, honest view over it.
Each running Claude Code agent, live: its model, effort, what it's doing right now, and its momentum. The queue is ordered by who needs you — failed, then blocked, then asking, then done — with notifications, and click-to-focus that jumps straight to that agent's terminal.
When Claude errors mid-session, Tower has already answered the only question that matters. It probes your link and times a TLS handshake to Anthropic's edge, continuously and passively — so it can name the fault instead of guessing at it. An on-demand speed test is one click away.
A small local proxy holds Claude's requests whenever you are confirmed outside your country — fail-closed, so anything uncertain waits. A held request is answered 503 with a Retry-After, never 403: Claude retries it into its own spinner, and it resumes the moment you're back. Pending, not failed.
Your true plan limits, mirrored from Claude Code's own claude -p /usage — Claude does its own auth, and Tower never reads a token. A local token-and-cost estimate sits beside it, clearly labeled as the guess it is.
A native menu bar app — Swift, AppKit and SwiftUI. Click the radar in the bar and the whole tower drops down, in strict attention order: what needs you first, then what's working.
You run Claude Code exactly as before — no wrapper, no flag, no extra command. When the guard holds a request, Claude sees a retryable 503 and waits in its own native spinner. The moment your connection or location recovers, the same turn resumes where it stopped.
A zero-dependency curses dashboard — pure Python stdlib, reading the same state file as the app. Change a setting in one and the other reflects it in about a second.
Deliberately monochrome and minimal. Still at rest — and while its agent works, each comes alive in its own way. The tier's color appears only in the small label beside it, never on the mark itself.
The point is practical: one glance at the roster tells you which model is running which job — so the heavy spiral doing a doc tweak, or a haiku carrying a refactor, jumps out before it burns tokens (or your week's Fable budget) on the wrong tier.
Tower is open source — use it, fork it, port it. One portable daemon with thin front-ends is what makes each of these tractable.
Half done: the daemon and the terminal dashboard already run on Windows — same guard, same JSON, still dependency-free (experimental, untested on real hardware). Routing ported for free, since Claude Code reads the same settings.json everywhere. What's left is the native piece: a C#/.NET tray to stand in for the menubar.
A tray via AppIndicator, and the curses dashboard already runs. The daemon is stdlib-portable as-is.
Past same-repo and same-file: the exact lines two agents are about to fight over, and one tap to pause the other.
A longer memory for plan usage — weekly burn-down, and a heads-up before you hit a limit rather than after.
Beyond country: time-of-day windows, per-project rules, allowlists. The same fail-closed proxy, more ways to draw a fence.
Use the one-line install and you'll never see that. Tower isn't notarized with Apple, and macOS quarantines anything you download in a browser — so it checks the signature, doesn't recognize it, and refuses to open the app. A file fetched with curl is never quarantined, so macOS doesn't run that check and Tower opens normally. If you'd rather download the zip by hand, clear the flag yourself with xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Tower.app, or open it once and choose Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security. (Right-click → Open used to work; macOS 15 removed it.)
You're right to ask, and you shouldn't take anyone's word for it. Read the script first — it's short, and it's the same file the command fetches. It downloads the release from GitHub, unpacks it to /Applications, links the tower command, and opens the app. It asks for no password and never uses sudo. If you'd still rather not, download the zip from Releases and do it by hand.
No. Real plan usage is mirrored from Claude Code's own claude -p /usage — Claude does its own auth, and Tower never reads a token. The proxy tunnels HTTPS with CONNECT, so it sees hostnames and never decrypts your traffic.
It runs a small local proxy and points Claude Code at it through the HTTPS_PROXY key in ~/.claude/settings.json — never through your shell. When you are confirmed outside your target country, a Claude request is held and answered 503 with Retry-After, so Claude retries it into its own spinner. The request is pending, not failed, and it resumes the moment you are back on-country.
Quitting removes the proxy from settings.json first, so Claude Code returns to a direct connection. The guard un-routes on every clean exit and via atexit, and the daemon is single-instance. A crashed front-end can't break Claude.
Tower probes both, passively and continuously: your link, and a timed TLS handshake to api.anthropic.com. It reports online, degraded, offline, captive portal, or an Anthropic-side problem — plus an on-demand speed test. No guessing, and no Claude request is spent finding out.
Tower is free and open source. The full experience — menubar app plus terminal dashboard — runs on macOS 14 or later, on Apple Silicon.
On Windows 10/11, the daemon and the terminal dashboard already run — same guard, same fail-closed proxy, no dependencies. Treat it as experimental: it's written and reviewed, but not yet tested on real Windows hardware, so expect rough edges (and please report them). The native tray app is next. A Linux front-end is planned — the curses dashboard should already run there.
One line. It installs the app, puts tower on your PATH, and starts the guard — no password, no Gatekeeper warning, nothing to drag.
$ curl -fsSL https://ghhrmnzdh.github.io/tower/install.sh | sh
Read the script first — it's short, and it's the same file the command fetches. It downloads the latest release from GitHub, unpacks it to /Applications, links the tower command, and opens the app. It never asks for a password and never uses sudo.
Grab Tower.app.zip from Releases — not GitHub's “Source code (zip)”, which has no built app inside. macOS quarantines browser downloads and will call the app unidentified; clear it with xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Tower.app, or choose Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security. The one-liner above never hits this.
Building from source needs the Xcode Command Line Tools:
$ git clone https://github.com/ghhrmnzdh/tower && cd tower && ./build.sh
macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon · Claude Code installed · Python 3.8+ at runtime (macOS ships it). On Windows 10/11 the daemon and the terminal dashboard already run — experimental, tray app next. Linux is planned.