notifications
System for alerting the user when attention is needed. Use when you need to get the user's attention for questions, approvals, or when stuck.
When & Why to Use This Skill
This Claude skill provides a robust notification system designed to bridge the gap between AI agents and users through real-time alerts. It enables agents to proactively request attention for critical questions, seek approvals for sensitive operations, and provide status updates, ensuring seamless human-in-the-loop collaboration and preventing workflow bottlenecks during autonomous tasks.
Use Cases
- Approval Requests: Automatically pausing execution to seek user confirmation before performing high-risk operations like code deployments or database migrations.
- Clarification Loops: Notifying the user when the agent encounters ambiguous requirements that need human input to proceed correctly.
- Error & Incident Alerting: Immediately alerting the user with specific sound cues when the agent is stuck due to authentication failures or environment issues.
- Task Completion: Providing a 'success' notification once a long-running background task, such as a full test suite execution, is finished.
| name | notifications |
|---|---|
| description | System for alerting the user when attention is needed. Use when you need to get the user's attention for questions, approvals, or when stuck. |
Notification System
Automatasaurus includes a notification system to alert the user when their attention is needed.
Automatic Notifications
The system automatically sends notifications on stop based on context:
- Questions: When Claude asks a question and waits for input
- Approvals: When approval is needed to proceed
- Stuck: When an agent encounters an issue
- Complete: When all work is done
Explicit Notification Request
When you need to explicitly alert the user, use:
.claude/hooks/request-attention.sh <type> "<message>"
Notification Types
| Type | When to Use | Sound |
|---|---|---|
question |
You have a question that needs answering | Submarine |
approval |
You need approval before proceeding | Submarine |
stuck |
You've encountered an issue you can't resolve | Basso (alert) |
complete |
All assigned work is finished | Hero (success) |
info |
General notification | Glass |
error |
An error occurred | Basso (alert) |
Examples
# Question needs answering
.claude/hooks/request-attention.sh question "Should I use PostgreSQL or MySQL for this project?"
# Approval needed
.claude/hooks/request-attention.sh approval "PR #42 is ready for review"
# Got stuck
.claude/hooks/request-attention.sh stuck "Cannot access the GitHub API - authentication failed"
# Work complete
.claude/hooks/request-attention.sh complete "All 5 user stories have been implemented and tested"
# Error occurred
.claude/hooks/request-attention.sh error "Build failed with 3 errors"
When to Notify
Always Notify For:
- Questions that block progress
- Security-related approvals
- When you've been stuck for more than one attempt
- Completion of significant milestones
- Errors that require human intervention
Don't Notify For:
- Minor progress updates
- Self-recoverable errors
- Questions you can answer from context
Configuration
Notifications can be configured via environment variables:
# Disable sound
AUTOMATASAURUS_SOUND=false
# Custom log location
AUTOMATASAURUS_LOG=/path/to/custom.log
Platform Support
- macOS: Native notifications with sound
- Linux: Uses
notify-sendif available - Windows: PowerShell message box
Logging
All notifications are logged to $AUTOMATASAURUS_LOG (default: /tmp/automatasaurus.log):
[2025-01-02 14:30:45] [question] Automatasaurus: Which database should we use?
[2025-01-02 14:35:12] [complete] Automatasaurus: Feature implementation complete