Hashimoto proposes OSC 7501: a terminal escape sequence where programs report their own state — idle, working, done, blocked, or error — as key=value pairs over the pty. The only required key is state; optional keys cover app, human-readable base64 messages, and hierarchical ids for concurrent tasks. A six-line POSIX sh wrapper around rsync demonstrates the whole integration. Well-behaved terminals already ignore unknown OSCs, so it degrades safely. The motivating pain is real: "agentic inbox" tools currently classify agent status by scraping window titles. Herdr's TOML manifests include a rule matching Claude Code's busy by its Braille spinner character, with a regex updated when 2.1.228 switched to half-circles. Ten changes to that file in three months, for one program. He argues socket APIs can't cross SSH or containers; the pty already does. He's implemented it in libghostty and Rex, plus proof-of-concepts in Terraform, Claude Code, Codex, and Homebrew, each within a dozen lines. The irony of our era: we taught a program to be indistinguishable from a thinking colleague, and the interop breakthrough is teaching the terminal to read a spinner. One suspects Herdr's regex maintainers will simply pivot to parsing base64, but at least this time guessing is optional.