Feature request: --json support and finer-grained status for gh agent-task #12805
Description
Problem
I maintain gh-agent-viz, a TUI extension for monitoring Copilot coding agent sessions. I consume gh agent-task list and gh agent-task view output to build an interactive dashboard. Two gaps make this harder than it should be:
1. No --json flag 📦
gh agent-task list and gh agent-task view don't support --json, unlike most other gh commands. This means downstream tools have to scrape human-readable output, which is fragile and breaks when formatting changes.
What I'd love: --json support on list and view, consistent with the pattern used by gh pr list --json, gh issue list --json, etc.
2. running status covers two very different states 🤔
Currently a session has these statuses: running, needs-input, completed, failed, queued.
The problem is running conflates:
- Agent is actively working — writing code, running tests, making commits. Nothing for the user to do.
- Agent has responded and is waiting for the user — the agent finished its turn and the conversation is idle until the user continues.
Only needs-input (the agent explicitly asked a blocking question) surfaces as distinct. But the much more common case — agent finished a task and is waiting for the next instruction — looks identical to "agent is actively coding."
Why it matters: In a monitoring dashboard, users need to know which sessions need their attention. "Agent is waiting on me" is actionable; "agent is busy working" is not. Without this distinction, users have to click into each running session to figure out if it needs them.
What I'd love: A way to distinguish these states. Some options:
- A new status value like
awaiting-useroridle - A field in the output indicating who spoke last (agent vs user)
- A
last_activityorlast_agent_responsetimestamp that tools can use to infer idle state
Proposed --json fields 🗂️
For gh agent-task list --json, fields like:
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
id |
string | Session ID |
status |
string | Current status |
repository |
string | owner/repo |
branch |
string | Working branch |
title |
string | Session title or first message |
createdAt |
timestamp | When the session started |
updatedAt |
timestamp | Last activity |
pullRequestNumber |
int | Associated PR number, if any |
pullRequestUrl |
string | Associated PR URL, if any |
For gh agent-task view <id> --json, additionally:
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
events |
array | Session event log |
lastSpeaker |
string | user or agent — who sent the last message |
Willingness to contribute 🙋
Happy to help with a PR for the --json support if the team is open to contributions here! I'm already parsing the output in Go so I have a good sense of the data shape.
References
- gh-agent-viz — the downstream extension motivating this
- gh-agent-viz #121 — our tracking issue for finer-grained status
- gh-agent-viz #192 — UI rework plans that depend on richer data