Absence

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Surrender to intelligence.

AI advances faster than human thought can follow. People fall behind the agent's line of thought and often sit idle; this project calls that condition Absence.

Absence is a real-time visual observer for AI agents. It connects to an agent, shows what the agent is doing while it works, and leaves a reviewable record of the run.

What it shows

• The agent at work. The Stage renders the action in progress: a file read, a diff, a command with its output and exit code, an approval request, an MCP call. The Activity feed keeps the chronological record of the same run.
• The agent's view of the project. Agent Folder lists the files the agent read, wrote or edited, with the line ranges it read and the complete versions it produced. The project tree beside it is read from disk.
• A run as checkable facts. Absence Report reduces a run's events to a timeline, changed files, executions with exit codes, MCP usage, processes left running, recovery actions, loops, attention items and an outcome. The reduction runs in the web client, without an LLM and without parsing command text.
• A run after it ends. Sessions are archived in SQLite. History reopens an archived session, and replay rebuilds file contents, agent state and the current Stage action from the event stream and state snapshots.

Capabilities

Absence shows a live agent in three switchable faces, Rounds, Monitor and Chart, with Drip as an overlay that repeats the session in a small floating card. A run can be replayed at 0.25×–10× from snapshots taken every 25 events or 5 seconds. Absence Report covers both the run in progress and finished runs. Agent Eggs groups the processes the agent started, classified by behaviour into primary processes and folded helpers. Agent Folder keeps a version history per file, with diffs between complete versions. Resource metrics cover the agent tree, each egg, Docker containers and the host, sampled every 5 seconds and persisted to SQLite. MCP calls become their own events and cards. Approval requests show the agent's own options and return the user's choice. Sessions are archived with a run index and can be restored. An ACP proxy mode forwards an external ACP client to an agent unchanged and records the events alongside.

Supported agents

Absence ships seven ACP profiles. A profile is data: it describes the command to launch, its arguments and its preconditions, and no agent has a code branch of its own.

Agent	Profile	ACP entry Absence looks for	Authentication
Pi	pi	pi-acp on PATH, or the package pi-acp under node_modules	none
Codex	codex	codex-acp on PATH, or @zed-industries/codex-acp under node_modules	required
Codex, alternative ACP package	codex-acp-alt	explicit path, override or npx only; package codex-acp	required
DSH (DeepSeek Harness)	dsh	dsh --profile acp by default	none
Claude Code	claude-code	claude-code-acp on PATH, or @zed-industries/claude-code-acp under node_modules	optional
Qwen Code	qwen-code	qwen --experimental-acp	optional
Gemini	gemini	gemini --acp	optional

required means a profile whose credentials are missing is reported as needing authentication. Absence only checks whether the agent's credential files exist and does not read their contents. optional means the agent advertises authentication methods but can start without them.

A profile whose CLI is installed but has no ACP entry is reported as needing an adapter, together with the package to install. A profile with neither is reported as unavailable and is not offered in the picker. Absence does not install agents, and it downloads adapters through npx only when that fallback is enabled (ABSENCE_ALLOW_NPX=1, or allowNpx in ~/.absence/agents.json). Any ACP executable can be added as a custom entry with an id, label, command, arguments, environment and working directory. Entries from a synced ACP registry cache in ~/.absence/registry.json are offered when the entry can be launched on the current host. A scripted mock agent exists for the test suite and is not offered in the picker.

Install and run

Requirements: Node.js 22.19 or newer, npm, and at least one agent installed on the host. The agent runtime is not bundled.

From a source tree

git clone https://github.com/Dipsy233/Absence.git
cd Absence
npm install
npm run build
npm start

Open http://127.0.0.1:8848. For development, npm run dev runs the server and the Vite dev server together. The desktop shell runs from a source tree with npm run desktop:install, then npm run build and npm run desktop.

start-absence.bat on Windows and start-absence.sh on Linux perform the same steps: they install dependencies on the first run, rebuild the web app when it is missing or older than its sources, start the server and open the browser.

From a release package

Windows: run the installer Absence.Setup-0.5.0.exe, or unpack Absence-0.5.0.zip. Linux: run Absence-0.5.0.AppImage, or unpack Absence-0.5.0.tar.gz and start the headless server with bash resources/start-server.sh daemon.

The server listens on 127.0.0.1:8848 and has no authentication of its own. Run it on the same host, or place it behind a reverse proxy that authenticates requests.

Minimal usage flow

1. Start Absence and open the web UI. With no session open, the project picker is shown.
2. Enter a project path or choose a recent project, then open it.
3. Choose an agent. Each row is a discovery result for the host and carries a readiness state, the path or package where the agent was found, and the model the agent reports.
4. Send a prompt in the chat row at the bottom of the screen. Activity lists the events as they arrive, and the Stage shows the action in progress.
5. Switch faces from the top bar. Monitor is the default face and is arranged for a live run. Rounds presents the same run as a scene with a character and a story chain. Chart is the report page.
6. After the run, read the Absence Report in Chart. Earlier sessions are listed in the picker history and reopen with their archived events.

Interface

The build provides three switchable faces, Rounds, Monitor and Chart, plus the Drip overlay. Rounds presents a run as a desktop scene with a character and story cards. Monitor is arranged for a live run. Chart presents the Absence Report for a run.

Documentation

docs/index.md indexes every document with its purpose, audience and language pairing; docs/index.zh-CN.md is the Chinese index. Common starting points are architecture.md for layers and boundaries, agent-support.md for discovery and readiness rules, and ui-faces.md for the faces.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.