Manage alert overload #
I don't want to get live alerts from all sessions. But for one or two, ping me as soon as you're ready!
On a busy day I may have a dozen or more coding agent sessions going.
I don't want to get live alerts from most of them – they'll finish when they finish, and I'll look when I look.
But one or two I'm actively thinking about and iterating on – the ones where I want to know when a turn is done or the agent needs an answer from me.
The problem with most coding agent mobile apps is app-wide notifications.
Their notification settings are a single boolean – Notifications ON or Notifications OFF.
Leave it on and, after a day of alerts from every coding and chat session, you stop looking. Turn it off and you miss the ones you're tracking.
Pick the sessions that get your attention #
With Cmd+Ctrl, push notifications work on a session-by-session basis. Tap the bell on a session – Get notifications – and that session pushes to your phone when the agent finishes. Every other session stays quiet.
On my radar, still important but without the ping #
There's a middle tier between "notify me" and "ignore it" because some sessions I still want on my radar even if I don't want push notifications. Hence, Cmd+Ctrl On my radar.
An "On my radar" session sits at the top of your list where you can glance at it, but it never notifies. It's for the session I want to keep an eye on without being interrupted by it – a long-running job on the back burner that I don't want to forget.
Notify me, keep it on my radar, or leave it alone until I go looking.
So a typical day looks like this: one or two sessions with notifications on, a handful on my radar, and everything else out of the way until I go looking.
What the other apps do #
None of the main coding agents' native mobile apps do this. It's all or nothing when it comes to alerts.
- Claude Code Remote Control has two account-wide push toggles – one for when Claude decides to notify you, one for when it needs input. The docs say there's no finer control. The Claude desktop app can mute notifications for a whole project.
- OpenAI Codex has global notification settings in the ChatGPT apps. Per-thread muting is anopen feature request .
- GitHub Copilot in GitHub Mobile shows live progress notifications for agent sessions, switched off globally in Settings. Its push categories have no agent category, and its docs show no per-session control.
It's very useful to be able to say "alert on this session, not those".
This may seem like a small feature on paper. In practice it's what makes running many agents from a phone workable – your attention goes to the sessions you've decided matter, and nothing else nags you.
-- Michael