Workflow progress view: completion bar stuck at 0% while agents run, no ETA, unstable layout

Status Closed — not planned
Reported on v2.1.284
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 1 comment · opened Sep 29, 2026 · closed Sep 29, 2026

Summary

The footer progress bar for dynamic workflows (Workflow tool / /workflows) is misleading, and its layout keeps changing between releases. As a user I only need three stable things: what is running now, a reliable completion indicator, and an estimated finish time.

Environment

  • Claude Code 2.1.284, macOS 15.7.7, terminal CLI, auto mode on
  • Two workflows running at the same time in one session

What happens

  • The bar counts finished agents only. A workflow with 2 sequential agents (fix, then review) shows 0 % for ~50 minutes while its first agent is actively working (233k tokens so far), then jumps.
  • A workflow whose agent count depends on results (an optional retry round) has no stable denominator, so the bar can also move backwards or stall.
  • The only per-workflow figure is a token counter (e.g. ↓ 233.4k, ↓ 2.3m), which does not tell whether the run is progressing or stuck.
  • The layout of this view has changed several times across recent versions, which makes it hard to read at a glance. Related: #83562 (inconsistent rendering of identical states).

Expected

A simple, stable one-line-per-workflow view (the current compact style is fine), with:

  1. Current step: active phase and agent label (e.g. Revue · agent 2/2).
  2. Reliable progress: count running agents as partially done, or show done / running / queued explicitly, instead of a bar stuck at 0 %.
  3. Elapsed time per workflow and for the active agent, plus time since its last activity (to spot a hang).
  4. ETA when estimable (e.g. from completed agents' durations in the same run or from previous runs of the same script), shown as a range, or omitted, never a fake precise time.
  5. A stable layout across releases, or a documented setting to keep the compact view.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Launch a workflow with two sequential agent() calls, where the first one runs for 30+ minutes.
  2. Watch the footer: the bar stays empty until the first agent returns.

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