Ping Me When You're Done

You know the moment. You ask Claude Code (or Codex) to run the full test suite. 847 tests. That’s going to take a while.

So you do what any reasonable person does: you switch to Slack, check your email, maybe grab coffee. Ten minutes later you come back and… it finished eight minutes ago. Or worse, it failed immediately and you’ve been waiting for nothing.

The Waiting Game

AI coding agents are incredible at running long tasks autonomously:

• Full test suites
• Large refactors
• Database migrations
• Build and deploy pipelines
• Code generation across dozens of files

The problem isn’t the AI. It’s us. We can’t just sit there watching a terminal for 10 minutes. We have other things to do. But if we step away, we lose track of when the task finishes.

And sometimes the AI needs us mid-task. “Ready to deploy to production?” But we’re in the kitchen making lunch, not watching the terminal.

What If Your AI Could Tap You on the Shoulder?

That’s what Ping does.

When you say “ping me when you’re done,” your AI agent actually pings you. A notification appears on your phone, your Mac, wherever you are. And you can respond right from the notification. Works with both Claude Code and OpenAI Codex CLI.

You: "Run the full test suite and ping me when it's done"

[10 minutes later, you're in the kitchen]

Your phone: 🔔 "Tests complete: 234 passed, 2 failed"

You: *tap* "Show failures"

[Back in Claude Code]

Claude: "The failures are in auth_test.rs..."

No more guessing. No more coming back to a stale terminal. The AI tells you when it needs you.

Approvals Without Context-Switching

The best part? Quick-reply buttons.

When the agent needs a decision, you don’t have to run back to your desk:

🔔 Ready to deploy to production. 23 files changed.
   [Deploy]  [Cancel]  [Show diff]

Tap a button. Done. The agent continues. You go back to whatever you were doing.

This changes how you work with AI agents. Instead of hovering over them waiting for questions, you can actually multitask. They’ll find you when they need you.

How It Works

Ping uses the same infrastructure as Strayfiles sync — WebSocket connections to all your devices. When your agent calls the ping function, a notification goes out to everywhere you’re signed in.

First response wins. If you respond from your phone, your Mac notification dismisses automatically. No duplicate responses, no confusion.

Notifications are ephemeral. Five-minute timeout by default. No history stored. Your conversations with AI agents stay private.

Setting It Up

Works with both Claude Code and Codex CLI. Pick your agent:

Claude Code:

claude plugin install https://github.com/titofebus/strayfiles-ping.git
strayfiles-ping auth

Codex CLI:

curl -fsSL https://strayfiles.com/ping-install.sh | sh
codex mcp add strayfiles-ping -- strayfiles-ping
$skill-installer install https://github.com/titofebus/strayfiles-ping
strayfiles-ping auth

Requires Strayfiles Pro for the real-time infrastructure.

Full instructions in our Ping documentation.

Once installed, your agent just knows. Say “let me know when done” or “ping me if there are errors” — it understands.

The Little Things

We spent a lot of time on the details:

Smart truncation. Lock screen notifications show the first 100 characters. Full message visible when you unlock.

Proactive pinging. The agent doesn’t wait for you to ask. Long tasks (builds, test suites, deployments) automatically get a ping when they finish.

Graceful timeouts. If you don’t respond in time, the agent handles it — usually by asking in the chat when you get back. No stuck processes.

Cross-device sync. Respond from your phone, Mac, or even the TUI. First response wins.

The Bigger Picture

AI coding agents are becoming genuine collaborators. They run tasks, make decisions, handle complexity. But collaboration requires communication — and until now, that communication was one-way.

Ping makes it two-way. Your AI can reach you. You can respond from anywhere. The conversation continues even when you’re not at your desk.

This is how human-AI collaboration should work. Not you watching the AI, but the AI keeping you in the loop.

Try It

Ping is available now for Strayfiles Pro subscribers. If you’re already Pro, check the setup guide to get started.

If you’re not Pro yet, this might be the feature that makes it worthwhile. Especially if you’re spending hours a day with AI coding agents.

Your AI, pinging you when it matters.