Filtering and Muting Your Agent List

Once you're running more than a handful of agents, the sidebar list gets crowded. Some agents are waiting on you right now. Some are quietly idle. A few might not have done anything in a week. DorkOS gives you three simple controls to cut through that: show filters, an inactive count you can reveal on demand, and mute.

None of these delete or hide an agent for good. They just change what's on screen, and every one of them is one click away from showing everything again.

Show only what matters

Every group, and the "Agents" section for agents you haven't grouped, has a Show menu with three options:

• All: everything shows, except agents that have been quiet for a while (see Inactive agents below).
• Active: only agents that are working right now, or that need your attention.
• Needs attention: only agents waiting on you, like an approval or a failed run.

Open a group's "…" menu, or right-click it, and pick Show. Switch a busy "Clients" group to Needs attention and it collapses down to just the agents actually waiting on you, no scrolling required.

Filters are per-section: each group remembers its own choice, and the ungrouped "Agents" section has its own too. Switching one group's filter never touches another.

Nothing hides silently

When a filter (or the inactive check below) hides some of a section's agents, DorkOS always leaves a trail back to them: a small row at the bottom of the section that says something like "3 hidden" or "5 inactive agents." Click it to expand the hidden agents right there, in place. Click again to collapse them back.

You'll never wonder "wait, where did that agent go?" It's always one click away.

Inactive agents tuck themselves away

With the default All filter, agents that haven't had any activity in the last week automatically collapse behind an honest count, like "4 inactive agents." Everything else in the section, active or waiting-on-you, still shows normally. This keeps a section clean as your fleet grows, without you having to filter anything by hand.

Muting an agent or a group

Sometimes an agent (or a whole group) is doing a lot of work you don't need to watch closely right now, an experiment, a background job, something you'll check on later. Muting quiets it down without removing it from the sidebar.

Right-click an agent (or open its "…" menu) and choose Mute agent. A muted agent:

• Renders a little dimmer, with a small mute icon next to its name.
• Stops showing its activity badge (the small colored dot for "working" or "needs you").
• Never lights up a group's activity dot, even while it's actively working.
• Stays exactly where it is, and stays fully clickable. Muting is a display choice, not a way to disable an agent.

Muting a whole group works the same way, from the group's "…" menu: every member renders muted while the group stays muted, and the group's own activity dot goes dark too. Unmute the group and every member goes right back to whatever its own mute state was before, muting a group never changes an individual agent's mute setting underneath it.

Smart groups: sections that keep themselves organized

A regular group is a list you build by hand: you drag agents into it, and they stay there until you move them out. Once you're running a lot of agents, or a mix of runtimes like Claude Code and Codex, hand-tuning that list gets old fast. Agents finish work, go idle, switch projects, and your group falls out of date.

A smart group is a section that fills itself in. Instead of a list of agents, it holds a rule, like "agents that are active or need me right now." Every time the sidebar refreshes, DorkOS checks the rule against your fleet and shows whoever matches. Idle agent drops off the list. New agent starts working and joins in. You never touch it.

Creating one

Click the + button above your agent list and you'll see a "Smart group" section with one-click starters:

• Active now: agents that need you or are actively working.
• By runtime: one starter per runtime you're running, like "By runtime · Codex," for any runtime with two or more agents.

Pick one and the group appears instantly, already filled in. Want something more specific? Choose Custom rules… to build your own: which runtimes, which namespaces, which status (active, needs attention, idle, or inactive), how recently active, or agents whose folder starts with a certain path. Combine as many of these as you want. Every rule you add narrows the group further.

Always honest about what it's showing

A smart group tells you exactly what rule it's running. Open its "…" menu and you'll see a plain-English summary, like "Codex · active in the last hour," right above the usual options.

If nothing matches the rule, the group doesn't disappear. It shows "No agents match these rules," so you always know the group is there and working, just empty for now.

You can't drag an agent into a smart group. Since its membership comes from the rule, dropping an agent on it does nothing but show a reminder that you'll want to edit the rule instead. An agent that matches a smart group's rule still shows up in its usual group too. Nothing gets moved out from where you put it by hand.

Editing or converting

Change your mind about the rule any time: open the group's "…" menu and choose Edit rules. The same form you used to create it comes back, prefilled with the current rule.

If you'd rather freeze today's members and manage the group by hand from here on, choose Convert to manual group. DorkOS takes whoever matches right now, drops them into a regular group with that same name, and you're free to add, remove, and reorder them yourself.

Where these settings live

Show filters and mute are saved to your account, the same as groups and pinning, so they follow you across the desktop app and the browser. They don't affect anyone else on a shared DorkOS instance.

Next steps