Notify user when Codex needs attention

[jvmatl]

What feature would you like to see?

PROBLEM

It frequently happens that I find myself working in another window and I don't notice that codex has stopped working because it is waiting for permission to do something that requires elevated privileges. I want to be able to keep my AI minions busy!

REQUEST

I would like to be able to define a shell command that gets called whenever Codex needs my attention, either because it is finished, or because it has a question, or it needs elevated permissions.

If I had this, I could have it echo some bell characters to the terminal to make noise, or pop up a silly xeyes that will show on the screen, or even call a script to text me wherever I am so I can ssh in from the ski slopes and unblock it. 😄

To enable/disable/configure this feature, a new slash command could be added to manage notifications.

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FEATURIZING

I would be very happy with just the baseline request, but there are a couple of completely optional additions that might be useful to some users:

• Have a default cross-platform notification option, so users don't have to enter a shell command into a config file somewhere. (e.g. have a 'notifyForAttention' boolean, but let users override the notify method with a 'notifyForAttentionAction' config string that gets passed to the local CLI)

• I could see some value in separating this feature out into two, or even three separate flags -- not worth the additional complexity, IMO, but some people might like it.

  • Notify if permission needed
  • Notify if the AI model has a question
    • OR this could be rolled into the first option and just "Notify whenever I need help"
  • Notify when work is complete/ready for next task. (but don't trigger this when codex first opens, because that would be irritating AF.)

Thanks for your time.

Additional information

No response

[etraut-openai]

This will be addressed as part of the event hooks feature, which is currently under development. It's being tracked in this feature request if you'd like to upvote it.

In the meantime, the Codex CLI does support a tui.notifications mechanism that emits an OSC 9 escape sequence when Codex needs attention. See this documentation for details. Not all terminal emulators support OSC 9 escape sequences, so we're looking to make this configurable.