How to Get Notified When Claude Code Needs Your Input

Why Claude Code Keeps Pausing

Claude Code is built to work autonomously, but it is deliberately not fully unattended. It stops and asks for your input at the moments that matter most: before running a command it has not been pre-approved to run, when it needs you to confirm a plan, when it hits an ambiguous decision, or when it has simply finished the task and is waiting for what comes next.

These pauses are a feature. They keep you in control of your codebase. But they also create a problem: Claude Code has no way to reach out to you. It sits silently in a terminal tab, waiting. If that tab is not the one you are looking at, you have no idea it needs you. The agent is ready to keep going, and the only thing standing in the way is that you did not notice.

This is the root of AI agent idle time: the gap between when the agent stops and when you respond. Closing that gap is the single highest-leverage change you can make to how fast you ship with Claude Code.

The Manual Approaches and Why They Fail

Most developers try to solve this with discipline. They keep the Claude Code tab visible in a split pane, or they set a personal rule to check it every minute. Both approaches break down quickly.

Keeping the tab visible only works if you have nothing else demanding screen space, which is rarely true. The moment you open documentation, a browser, or a second project, the agent disappears behind your other windows. And checking on a timer means you are context switching constantly, which destroys your focus on whatever else you were doing.

Some developers wire up a terminal bell or a shell hook that plays a sound when a command finishes. This is closer to the right idea, but it is fragile. It fires on every command completion, not just the ones where Claude Code is actually waiting for you, so you quickly learn to ignore it. What you want is a signal that fires only when your attention is genuinely needed.

The Notification-Based Solution

The reliable fix is to have something watch Claude Code for you and send a native macOS notification at the exact moment it stops and waits. You get the ping in Notification Center, you switch over, you give your next instruction, and you switch back. The agent is never idle for more than a few seconds.

Pulser is a free macOS menubar app built for precisely this. It watches your terminal sessions and detects when an AI agent like Claude Code transitions from working to waiting. The instant it does, you get a native Mac notification. There is nothing to configure in Claude Code itself and no hooks to maintain.

Because Pulser is watching the actual state of the session rather than just listening for a command to finish, it does not spam you. You get notified when Claude Code is waiting on you, not every time it runs a single shell command in the middle of a longer task.

Setting It Up in Under a Minute

Getting notifications working is fast. Download Pulser, drag it to your Applications folder, and launch it. It lives in your menubar and starts watching your terminal sessions automatically. Grant it notification permission when macOS asks, and you are done.

From that point on, run Claude Code exactly as you normally would. There is no special command and no flag to add. When Claude Code stops to ask whether it should proceed, or finishes a task and waits, Pulser sends the notification. Click it or switch to the terminal, respond, and keep moving.

This works the same way whether you run Claude Code in the built-in Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, or inside your editor's integrated terminal. Pulser watches the process, not a specific app.

Getting More Out of It

Once notifications are in place, a few habits make the workflow even better. Give Claude Code larger, well-scoped tasks so it runs for longer uninterrupted stretches. The longer it works, the more useful the notification is, because you can fully commit to something else in the meantime.

The setup also scales. If you run multiple Claude Code sessions at once, each in its own terminal, Pulser watches all of them independently and tells you which one needs attention. You can keep two or three workstreams moving in parallel without manually tracking the state of each.

The result is simple but powerful. Claude Code never waits on you longer than it takes to read a notification, and you get to stay focused on your own work in between. That is the whole point: the agent works, you work, and the handoffs happen in seconds.