The longer my AI agent runs, the less I want to watch it. How are you solving this UX problem?

I built a tiny physical avatar for my coding agent mostly as a joke. It sits next to my monitor and acts out what the agent is doing: reading → looks around, thinking → leans back, coding → types, done → rings a bell. But after using it, I realized it accidentally solved a real problem: I can stop watching the agent. If a task takes 10 seconds, I’ll watch it. If it takes 10 minutes, I want to do something else while still knowing whether it’s making progress or needs me. And that made me question my current UX: reading → thinking → coding → done When my attention is elsewhere, I actually care about: Is it making progress? Is it stuck or retrying? Does it need me? Did something fail? Can I safely keep ignoring it? For people building or regularly using long-running agents: what signals have actually worked for you? I’m considering moving toward: exploring → executing → validating → needs attention → done The robot has movement, a display, sound and speech, so those signals could range from subtle peripheral feedback to an explicit interruption. The project started purely for fun, but I’d like to make the next version genuinely useful as an ambient interface for agents. If you let agents work in the background, what information do you need to comfortably look away and what events are important enough that the agent should interrupt you? I’m looking for inspiration, so please share anything you’ve seen or built that could be relevant... even if it’s not an exact solution to this problem.