# Why an agent status monitor does not need your transcripts

Canonical: https://perched.fyi/blog/status-without-transcripts/
Updated: 2026-10-23

“Is it still working?” is a much smaller question than “What did it say?” Perch keeps those questions separate, using local activity events for monitoring rather than retaining a second copy of an agent conversation.

## The information a glance needs

To show a working session, a monitor needs a session identity and a state. To help you find that session later, it needs context such as the project folder and host app. Times and tool names can describe recent activity without carrying the arguments or the output.

Perch saves that kind of status locally: session identifiers, folder, state, times, terminal context and tool names. Prompts, commands, diffs, responses and transcripts do not become its stored session history.


## A request has a different lifetime

Answering a request does require showing its content. You should see what a tool wants to run or what question an agent is asking before responding. In Perch, a pending request reaches the app over a private local socket and stays in memory while it is waiting.

That content is discarded once you answer. It does not need to become a searchable transcript just because it was visible on a card. The data needed to make a decision and the data needed to show a past state are different.


## What Recent steps can tell you

A recent-steps list can describe the sequence and timing of activity: work started, a tool ran, the session needed you, and a turn finished. It can give you a quick way back into the rhythm of a session.

It cannot explain the full reasoning, preserve the output of every command or establish that an edit was correct. For that, open the agent and inspect the project. A status summary should not pretend to be a complete audit log.


## Local monitoring does not change the agent provider

Perch itself makes no network requests. Claude Code, Codex and Cursor remain separate tools. Their own processing and data policies still apply to the material you give them.

Likewise, this website’s launch list and hosting are separate from the local app. A useful privacy explanation names the system, the data and the lifetime instead of applying one broad label to everything around a product.


## Related reading
- [What Perch stores and which permissions it needs](https://perched.fyi/guides/privacy-and-permissions/)
- [/privacy/](https://perched.fyi/privacy/)
- [What does local-first mean for Perch?](https://perched.fyi/glossary/local-first/)