The thirty-second answer that saves two hours

Here is the arithmetic that makes a fleet of coding agents worth running, or not.

An agent stops. It has a question - which of two interfaces to use, whether it should touch a file outside its brief, what you meant by a word in the prompt. Answering takes about thirty seconds. If you are at your desk, the work loses thirty seconds. If you are at the supermarket, it loses two hours, and so does everything downstream of it.

The agent is not the bottleneck in that story. Your proximity to a keyboard is.

What the phone shows

Open DevThrottle on your phone and the sessions waiting on you sit at the top, under a red Needs you heading, longest-waiting first. Everything else is below. If there is no Needs you section, nothing is waiting and you can put the phone away.

Each card carries three facts: how long it has been waiting, which repository it is in, and how many turns it has taken. The waiting time is the one to read. It is not a status - it is how much of your day this agent has already lost.

One caveat worth knowing before you trust an empty list: a machine or repository filter you set earlier sticks on the phone, and it can hide waiting sessions. If a strip under the title bar names a filter, tap Clear first. If there is no strip, the list is the whole truth.

The interaction

Tap the card. You get the conversation, ending with the question. You answer. The session carries on. That is the whole loop, and it is the one you will do most often - far more often than opening a laptop.

The thing that makes it work is that you are not administering anything. You are not reading logs, resuming a job, or reconstructing what happened. You are reading one question and giving one answer, which is a thing a person can do in a queue.

Text now, voice if you want it

Answering by text is on every account, permanently, along with the session list and the connected machines. Speaking your answer, having replies read back, and the wingman are the parts we run a model for, and those are Pro.

Start with text even if you intend to use voice. It shows you the whole path working - agent stops, phone buzzes, you answer, session moves - and that path is the product. Voice makes it faster; it does not make it different.

Set it up before you need it

The one thing you cannot do from the supermarket aisle is pair the phone. It takes a couple of minutes at your desk: pairing your phone, then the quick answer for the loop itself.

Do it on a day when nothing is waiting. The value shows up on a day when something is.