You kick off a Claude Code task that's going to take twenty minutes. You tab away. You forget. Forty minutes later you remember, and the agent's been sat there waiting for input since minute twelve. Proper waste of time, and I kept doing it until I wired up notifications.

ntfy is the one I reach for. Self-hostable, no signup, no faff. One curl and your phone buzzes.

curl -d "Agent finished the migration" ntfy.sh/my-agent-alerts

Someone built an ntfy MCP server if you want the MCP route, though I'd recommend calling it through mcporter rather than loading the full tool schema into your context (see why MCP is a context tax). Even simpler: agent-notify hooks ntfy into Claude Code's lifecycle events directly, so you get pinged on completion without any MCP wiring at all. That's what I run. Mint.

PingMe does something different. Single binary, env var config, blasts notifications to Slack, Telegram, Discord, Teams, Pushover, Mastodon, email, and about ten more. If your team lives across five different chat apps (and whose doesn't), PingMe covers them all from one command. There's a GitHub Action too, which is handy for CI pipelines.

I use ntfy because agent-notify means zero wiring on my end. The agent finishes, I get a ping. PingMe's the better shout if you need to fan out alerts to the whole team across platforms. Pick whichever matches your setup, but stop checking your terminal every three minutes like a muppet. That was me. Don't be me.