Meanwhile
It covers your screen while your coding agent works — and lets go the moment it's done.
Your agent runs for 40 seconds. You open Reddit. You come back 20 minutes later.
$19 one-time · 14-day trial · no subscription · nothing leaves your machine
Download the 14-day trial Buy now · $19 once →Requires macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon or Intel · Claude Code
Notifications tell you when to come back
Meanwhile solves the narrower problem: you did not want to leave for a 40-second run in the first place. It puts a deliberate step between you and the tab that turns forty seconds into twenty minutes.
How it works
Six seconds into a run, a full-screen overlay appears showing what the agent is doing and how long it has been going. Six seconds, because a takeover on every three-second reply gets uninstalled.
To leave, you have to hold for two seconds. When the agent finishes, the overlay vanishes and you're exactly where you were. You can always press Option-Command-Escape for an immediate keyboard exit.
After five minutes Meanwhile gives the machine back. The overlay steps aside and the menu bar carries the run instead, so a long job doesn't hold a screen you're no longer waiting at. If the agent finishes while you're elsewhere, you get a notification.
The screen it shows is deliberately plain, without calendars, news or now-playing widgets. The whole point is that there is nothing on it worth staying for.
Why $19
Because you could build this yourself in a weekend, and at $19 it isn't worth your weekend.
What you'd be buying isn't the overlay; it's the numbers. Six seconds before it appears. Two seconds of holding to leave. Five minutes before it gives the screen back. Every one of those, set wrong, makes the thing intolerable inside ten minutes. They are set right here because they were set wrong first.
One payment, with no subscription, account or server that can go away and take your licence.
Fourteen days first, everything working. If you're still running it on day 14, you already know whether it's worth $19. If you're not, you owe me nothing.
See whether it earns its place
Meanwhile keeps a local report of covered runs, protected duration, blocks surfaced and long runs handed back. It reports only what it observed, never invented “time saved,” and the history can be cleared at any time.
Privacy
Meanwhile makes no background network calls. It contacts Lemon Squeezy only when you ask it to activate a licence. If activation fails, you can explicitly retry.
There is no app analytics, tracking, telemetry or update checking. Your transcripts never leave your machine.
Meanwhile reads Claude Code's local transcript to show what your agent is doing. That data is read on your machine and stays there.
This page counts visits and button clicks with Umami, which sets no cookies and collects nothing personal, only totals. Nothing to consent to. The app itself stays exactly as described above.
Installing
Download the .dmg, drag Meanwhile to Applications, and launch it. It lives in the
menu bar, with no dock icon or ordinary app window.
On first launch Meanwhile asks to add three hooks to ~/.claude/settings.json and
lets you review the exact thirteen-line diff before installing it. The change takes effect
mid-session; Claude Code does not need restarting. Meanwhile then tells you exactly how to
trigger the first Hold.
To remove it, choose Remove Claude Code hooks… from the menu bar before dragging the app to the Trash. That takes the hooks back out and leaves your other hooks alone.