Your agent needs you. Where should it find you?
I had Claude Code running behind a notes window. It reached a permission prompt and sat there while I kept working. I was on the same Mac the whole time.
That felt worse than missing a finished task. I was not away. The terminal was simply not where my attention was.
A reply on my first thread here changed how I think about this. @tristan666666 wrote that agent runs should not own your attention. The reply split the problem into two distances: quiet awareness when you are at the desk, and a real interruption when you are away.
I think that split is right. What I cannot settle is the default.
A. Keep everything inside the terminal.
B. Show quiet state in the menu bar or notch, then expand only when I need to act.
C. Use a normal desktop alert.
D. Send it to my phone even when I am still at the Mac.
E. Use every surface and let me silence the ones I hate.
Which one would you actually leave enabled after a month?
I am especially curious about the last permission you missed. Were you away from the computer, or just working in another window?
Disclosure: I build Pushary. We are working on the Mac side of this problem now. I am asking before we lock the default, because notification settings are easy to add and hard to make people revisit.
Replies
B makes the most sense to me. Just a small “hey, you need to check this” signal while i'm working in another window would be enough.
Pushary
@kabir_suleman_kusfa
That’s exactly the distinction. The last thing I want is another notification feed. Just a quiet signal that stays out of the way until the agent actually needs you. One detail I’m still debating: should it remain visible until you act, or briefly pulse and fade?
Pushary
To make the choice concrete, this is the default I am leaning toward:
At the Mac: a quiet notch signal. No sound, no banner.
If the agent needs a decision: expand in place.
If nobody answers after 60 seconds: send the same question to the phone.
If policy can decide safely: allow or deny silently and write it to the audit trail.
The unresolved part is that 60-second handoff. Too fast and the phone becomes noisy.
Too slow and the agent stays blocked.
Would you want the phone handoff immediately, after a delay, or only when the Mac is locked?