Claude Code or Codex Session Not Detected

When a session is missing from the island, the cause is nearly always upstream: the coding tool has not written local evidence yet, it wrote it under a different home directory, or macOS is blocking the read. Agent Island never asks a provider what you are running — it reads the records your tools already write, so that is where to look.

Before you start

• The coding tool has been launched at least once under the same user account

1. Confirm the tool wrote something at all

Check the roots directly before touching any setting. If these directories are empty, no monitor could see the session either.

2. Match the root to your provider

Each tool writes somewhere specific:

• Claude Code — ~/.claude/projects, one folder per project
• Claude Desktop — session metadata under ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude-code-sessions
• Codex — ~/.codex/sessions, indexed by ~/.codex/session_index.jsonl
• Grok — ~/.grok/sessions
• Antigravity — its CLI data directory under ~/.gemini
• Cursor — its local store under ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor; since 2.1.2 it carries live session state and your-turn alarms too

A custom HOME, a second user account, or a container will move these — and the app only reads the home directory it is running under.

3. Check the provider is enabled in the app

Open Settings → Providers. A provider you hid earlier stays hidden until you re-enable it, and a provider with no detected local sign-in gets no slot and no row at all.

4. Grant file access on macOS

If the roots exist and contain recent files but the app still shows nothing, macOS privacy protection is the usual culprit. Add Agent Island under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Files and Folders, or grant Full Disk Access if the folders sit outside the standard locations.

Quick discriminator: if your shell can ls the directory but the app sees nothing, it is permissions, not paths.

5. Give a new session a moment, and expect old ones to retire

A brand-new session becomes visible once it has written its first meaningful event — usually seconds. Old sessions expire on purpose: past the attention window they are treated as idle rather than shown as permanently active. A session that vanishes after a long pause has not been lost; it has been retired.

6. Use restart as a diagnostic, not a repair

Restarting rebuilds the index. If a session only ever appears after a restart, that is a bug worth reporting rather than a workflow. Note the provider, the session start time, and whether the coding tool was launched before or after Agent Island.

If it does not work