Qwen Code was still working.
Your Mac didn't care.

Why your Mac sleeps while Qwen Code is still going

Qwen Code spends most of a task waiting on a model response — which barely uses any CPU. But macOS doesn't decide from CPU at all — it goes by your idle time, how long since real keyboard or mouse input, plus the power assertions running processes hold. So working hard doesn't protect the machine: a Mac mid-refactor sleeps on exactly the same schedule as one doing nothing. After your system-sleep timer runs out, macOS suspends the Mac, and the qwen process is frozen along with everything else until you wake it back up.

This bites hardest on the runs worth walking away from: a long plan-then-edit pass across a repo, a big test-and-fix loop, or anything you kicked off and left alone. The fix is to stop macOS from sleeping for as long as the agent is actually running — then let it sleep normally again once the run is done. You can do that for free in two minutes, or with a tool that watches for real agent activity so you don't have to babysit it.

If you only run Qwen Code occasionally, you don't need to buy anything. Because it's a terminal agent, the cleanest free fix is one command:

• The built-in caffeinate command. Launch your session as caffeinate -i qwen instead of qwen. The Mac can't idle-sleep while the agent runs, and the moment Qwen Code exits, normal sleep is allowed again — nothing to remember to undo. Already on your Mac, free. For a scripted, non-interactive run, wrap the whole command the same way: caffeinate -i qwen -p "your instruction".
• Attach to a session you already started. You don't have to restart it. Check what's running first with pgrep -lf qwen, then hold sleep off until that exact process exits with caffeinate -i -w <pid>. The -f form is needed here because Qwen Code is a Node program installed from npm, so what macOS lists as the process is often node with the qwen script in its arguments — a plain pgrep qwen finds nothing. The trade-off: -f also matches anything else with "qwen" in its command line, so read the list and pick the PID by hand rather than piping it straight in.
• Amphetamine (free, Mac App Store). A menu-bar toggle to keep the Mac awake on a timer or while your terminal app is open — handy if you'd rather flip a switch than type a command.

All of these are a fine choice if Qwen Code runs for a few minutes here and there. The catch: none of them knows when the agent actually finished a task versus when it's just sitting at an idle prompt. You either stop it yourself, or it keeps your Mac awake — and your battery draining — long after the work is done.

Alibaba also ships Qwen Code Desktop, a Mac app. AgentBarista has an entry for it, and it does less than the terminal entry does. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight.

For a graphical app we don't trust CPU as proof of work. An Electron window redraws, indexes, and animates at percentages that would clear any threshold we could set, so treating that as "the agent is working" would mean holding your Mac awake for as long as the app is open — which is exactly the battery-flattening behavior we're trying to avoid. For this app the work signal has to come from a phrase on screen, because we don't trust a GUI's CPU and it has no session file we can watch. We haven't watched Qwen Code Desktop run a real task on a Mac, so we don't know which phrase it shows while it's busy — and we'd rather ship no guess than a guess that either buys nothing or keeps your Mac awake forever. Its bundle id and app-folder name come from upstream packaging too, so even the "it's running" row is unconfirmed until someone installs it. Either way: no work signal today.

Practical upshot: if you kick off long work from the desktop app and walk away, don't rely on us for it yet — use manual keep-awake for that run, or drive the same job from the CLI, where the CPU signal does work. If you're on the terminal version, the built-in entry is doing its job, with the phrase caveat above.

One more thing about the desktop app that we've allowed for: its bundle carries its own copies of command-line tools inside it, including a codex binary. AgentBarista keys a process to the first .app folder in its path, so the CLI tools bundled inside Qwen Code Desktop are counted as the desktop app, not as separate Codex or Qwen Code CLI rows. Merely opening it adds no stray row.