Let's Talk About FOMAT: Fear of Missing Agent Time — Michael Richman, Cmd+Ctrl

Michael Richman, an engineering leader at Bitly who co-leads their AI coding tools strategy and co-wrote the Bitly MCP server, introduces the concept of FOMAT — Fear of Missing Agent Time — at AI Engineer Europe 2026. FOMAT describes the frustration of losing productive agent cycles due to unavailability: stepping away from your machine while an agent has been silently blocked waiting for input, or being unable to kick off a new session because you are away from your development environment.

Richman frames FOMAT as an increasingly urgent problem. Today, coding tasks run 5 to 45 minutes and developers can reasonably check back manually. As task durations extend toward 5 hours or 5 days — a trajectory he considers inevitable — the cost of missed agent time becomes substantial and unpredictable. Agents block on questions at arbitrary points, and there is currently no reliable mechanism to be notified or to respond outside the native terminal or IDE environment.

His solution is Cmd+Ctrl (Command and Control), a system he built because nothing else addressed the workflow gap at the time. The architecture comprises a per-agent daemon that runs alongside each coding agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Open Code — and monitors session lifecycle events such as blocking states, completions, and new output. Each daemon reports to a shared control plane layer. A mobile and web UI (iOS, Android, web, Apple Watch) connects to that control plane, providing a single pane of glass into all agent sessions regardless of which tool they use or which machine they run on — a local Mac or a cloud VM.

The talk includes three recorded demos. The first shows a Claude Code terminal session mirrored in real time to the Cmd+Ctrl iPhone app; the user subscribes for push notifications, issues a simple command (`sleep 1 second; say hello`), walks away, receives a push notification on completion, and replies from the phone — with the response reflected back in the terminal session. The second demo shows starting a brand-new Claude Code session directly from the mobile UI, selecting a working directory, issuing a prompt, and then seamlessly resuming that conversation in the terminal. The third demo focuses on session management: thousands of accumulated sessions are organized into subscription tiers (push-notification subscriptions, on-radar monitoring, 24-hour recent, and archive), plus an overview dashboard that auto-generates standup-style summaries of recent sessions using their last several messages.

A key architectural decision is that the daemon layer is open source, allowing any agent framework to be integrated and surfaced through the same unified UI. Richman notes that Anthropic recently shipped remote-control and teleportation mechanisms addressing adjacent problems, and that Cursor released a comparable solution just two days before his talk, validating the direction.

Richman closes with a broader observation about the evolving nature of developer flow. The classic single-task deep-focus flow is giving way to agent choreography — managing multiple parallel agents, unblocking one, redirecting another — and the satisfaction comes from the elegance of that orchestration. He also echoes a point made by Matt Pocock and a Simon Willison interview on Lenny's Podcast: the cognitive load of managing many agent sessions is genuinely exhausting, and time away from agents is where the best ideas emerge. Systems like Cmd+Ctrl make those breaks safe by ensuring the developer can be reached — and can reach their agents — at any moment.