Battery HogOpen source
For agent-heavy coding

Parallel agents are productive. Parallel builds can quietly cook your battery.

Battery Hog helps you see which project workloads and agent descendants were active when power draw or thermal pressure climbed.

The hidden multiplier

A coding agent is not only a chat window. It may launch a package install, index a repository, run tests, start a development server, or fan a build across every core. Several agents can do those things at the same time—even when each individual process looks ordinary.

What Battery Hog adds

Ancestry

Recognized workers can be connected to the agent ancestor that launched them.

Projects

Working-directory and command signals turn many workers into understandable workloads.

History

A rolling window helps explain a thermal event after the spike, not only during it.

Choice

Open the workload, quit an app, or deliberately gate a heavy command—Battery Hog stays advisory by default.

What it will never do silently

Agent Mode does not intercept every command on the Mac. It does not pause arbitrary agents or kill their children. Only a command explicitly prefixed with Battery Hog’s gate participates. That makes coordination useful without turning a battery tool into an invisible process controller.

On AC power: gated commands pass through unchanged. On battery, they can share configurable heavy-job lanes and supported toolchains can receive conservative worker limits.

A useful test

  1. Open Battery Hog before an agent-heavy session.
  2. Watch total watts and active workloads—not battery percentage alone.
  3. When draw rises, look for duplicate project work or several compiler families.
  4. If the pattern repeats, route only the heavyweight commands you want coordinated through Agent Mode.

View the source and current release