Working with it

Being told when you are away

Sessions that need you or stopped, finished ones only if you ask, a voice, focus, and what the rows no longer show when you come back.

Every alert here is off by default, and none turns itself on. The switches are in Settings › Alerts.

Notify me when a session waits for me or fails

Only needs you and stopped, never done unless you ask.

That distinction is the whole feature. A finished answer can wait until you look at it; a permission cannot, because until you answer, that work is stopped. With a dozen sessions, notifying on green too would produce tens of alerts a day, and a channel that alerts too often gets switched off within two days. At that point the real blocks stop arriving as well.

A turn that fails notifies too: it stopped, and nothing will move it but you.

If you do want to hear about finished turns, Also when a turn finishes adds them, with the first line of the answer. Off by default, for the reason above.

Each alert says what happened rather than that something did: the command or the question a session waits on, why a turn died, the start of a finished answer. Failed and finished are announced when they happen, never for a column already red when the panel starts.

Clicking the notification takes you to that session.

What suppresses an alert is only what you asked for: the memory that avoids duplicates, a project silenced from its row's Quiet menu, Mute alerts for an hour, a session in focus, and being away. Projects you've silenced, in Settings › Alerts, lists the ones you quieted and gives them back.

Said aloud

Say it aloud when I'm away from the keys adds a sentence to the alert for a session waiting for you: "docs-site is waiting for you." It speaks only when nobody has touched the Mac for a minute and the screen is unlocked: for someone across the room, who would not see a banner. Whatever holds the alert holds the voice. Off by default.

Mute alerts for an hour

In the panel's ⋯ menu and the lamp's. For an hour nothing pops up, and the rows still change colour. While it lasts, the entry reads Resume alerts, with the time it ends.

One session in focus

Focus on this session, in a row's Quiet menu or in the Hub, pins that row. While it is there the other sessions' alerts wait, though their rows still change colour. When the focus comes off, one notification says what waited and is still so.

I'm away

Say so with I'm away, in the panel's ⋯ menu or the lamp's, or lock the screen: after three minutes locked you count as away. While you are, no alert interrupts, and the panel counts what happens.

When you come back, one line at the foot of the panel says what the rows no longer show, and the same line arrives as a notification: "While you were away (1h 20m): 2 earlier answers (api, docs-site), 1 earlier failure (billing-worker), $2.10 spent." An answer still green or a session still asking is on its row already, so it is not repeated, and when there is nothing else to say there is no line at all. The first click on the panel puts it away.

With the helper and the Safety catch while I'm away on, in Settings › Acting from the panel, a command that would delete recursively, force-push, discard changes or run as root waits for you while you are away, even where your settings would let it run on its own. The session says why, and the dialog is there when you come back. The rules are a fixed list of spellings, not a reading of the shell: a seatbelt, not a sandbox. It is on by default, and only acts with the helper installed.

Skip Claude Code's phone pushes while I'm at this Mac

Claude Code skips its own push notifications if a file named by an environment variable exists. With this switch on, the panel creates that file while you are there and deletes it when you lock the screen.

export CLAUDE_CLIENT_PRESENCE_FILE="$HOME/.lampboard/presence"

This one inverts a built-in behaviour, so if the detection gets it wrong the result is not one notification too many but a notification lost. It needs no permission, only that variable.