Claude Code & Codex notifications: desktop alerts & menu bar

Andon’s whole job is to grab your attention at the right moment — when an agent needs you or gets blocked — and otherwise stay quiet. The board is the universal channel (works on any device); these add more, each degrading gracefully across macOS / Linux / Windows.

Native desktop alerts

A banner on the machine running the server, on by default. Loud for the states that need you, quiet for completion:

• needs-you (amber) / stuck (red) → banner + sound (immediate).
• done (green) → one quiet banner (no sound), debounced 4s so a transient green never fires a false “ready”.

andon serve                 # alerts on by default
andon serve --say           # also speak needs-you / stuck aloud
andon serve --no-notify     # turn alerts off

Uses osascript/say (macOS), notify-send/spd-say (Linux), PowerShell toast/System.Speech (Windows). Missing tool → silently skipped. (Auto-off under --demo so the cycling fake agents don’t spam you.) Alerts are throttled (per-session cooldown + a global token bucket) so a busy — or malicious — LAN client posting to /event can’t drive a process-spawn flood.

Menu / status bar

A one-glance summary without a separate screen:

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8787/menubar     # plain-text summary endpoint

Wire it to SwiftBar/xbar (macOS) or Waybar/polybar (Linux); see examples/andon-menubar.5s.sh.

Fewer interruptions? Configure approvals yourself

Andon never touches your permission/approval settings — that’s yours to own. If amber “needs you” fires more than you’d like, pre-approve safe operations in your agent’s own config (Andon will then only light up for the rest):

• Claude Code — add read-only patterns to permissions.allow in ~/.claude/settings.json, e.g. "Read", "Bash(git status:*)", "Bash(npm test:*)". Your deny/ask rules always take precedence, and the Bash matcher is shell-operator-aware (so Bash(git status:*) won’t approve git status && rm -rf). See /permissions.
• Codex — set approval_policy (e.g. "untrusted" auto-runs trusted read-only commands) and/or sandbox_mode in ~/.codex/config.toml.

Keeping this in your hands means Andon can never weaken your safety rules — and the board stays a faithful mirror of when you’re genuinely needed.