{"slug": "show-hn-clanking-turn-your-coding-agents-activity-into-a-subtle-soundscape", "title": "Show HN: Clanking – Turn your coding agents' activity into a subtle soundscape", "summary": "Developer Robert Church released Clanking, an open-source tool that turns LLM coding agent activity into a synthesized soundscape, signaling when an agent is working, waiting for input, or has finished. Clanking runs as a daemon invoked by coding agent hooks, quantizes sounds to sixteenth notes at a default 120 BPM (switching to thirty-second notes during high activity), and uses stereo position based on each session's working directory to distinguish agents. It requires a Unix-like system with PipeWire and the pw-cat utility, is written in Go with an optional GTK 4 UI, and installs via make install or the included Containerfile.", "body_md": "For machines called \"clankers\", LLM agents sure don't make much noise.\nAre they *too* quiet? Yes! But not anymore.\n\nClanking turns your LLM agents' activity into a subtle soundscape. It signals when an agent is working, waiting for input, or in another state. Clanking plays cues from many agents at once and harmonizes them into a happy chorus of chattering clankers.\n\n## demo.mp4\n\nCoding agent hooks invoke the Clanking CLI, which reads each hook event and plays a sound cue. For tool calls, it plays a short tick on one of several notes to signal that the agent is active. Other sounds indicate that the agent is outputting a response, waiting for input or permission, has finished, or has encountered an error.\n\nClanking runs as a daemon that starts on its first invocation, and the CLI sends messages to the background task on subsequent invocations. Sounds are quantized to sixteenth notes at the configured tempo, which defaults to 120 BPM. During high activity, Clanking switches to thirty-second notes. The program synthesizes the sounds.\n\nClanking uses stereo position to help you distinguish agent sessions. It positions each session according to the agent's working directory, so clanks from different sessions seem to come from different places.\n\nYou can configure the tempo and root note from the command line or Clanking's GTK 4 UI.\n\nClanking requires a Unix-like system with PipeWire and the `pw-cat`\nutility. It has an optional GTK 4 user interface for configuration.\nClanking is vibe-coded in Go and requires a Go toolchain and GTK 4\ndevelopment libraries to build.\n\nOn a Unix-like system with the required dependencies and an XDG-style\ndesktop (such as GNOME or KDE), `make install` installs `clanking`,\n`clanking-ui`, a desktop file, and an icon in your home directory.\n\nThe included `Containerfile` lets you build Clanking without installing\nall the development dependencies on your system. The `podman-make`\nscript builds and runs the container. Adapting it for Docker is left as\nan exercise for the reader or the reader's coding agent.\n\nWith `clanking` and `pw-cat` in your `$PATH` on a system with PipeWire,\nyou can configure your coding agent to invoke Clanking.\n\nFor Claude, install the Clanking plugin from this repository's marketplace:\n\n```\n/plugin install clanking --marketplace chrchr/clanking\n```\n\nFor Codex, add this repository as a plugin marketplace:\n\n```\ncodex plugin marketplace add chrchr/clanking\ncodex plugin add clanking@clanking\n```\n\nRestart Codex, then run `/hooks`. Trust the Clanking hooks.\n\n- \n[Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/full_papers/gilfix/gilfix_html/index.html) by Michael Gilfix and Prof. Alva Couch, Tufts University.\n- \n[Star Trek: The Next Generation](https://youtu.be/Drr6_zikuZQ?si=BIBxn--yIwatbIYS) .\nThe voice-interactive computer in the \"Star Trek\" franchise uses\nnonverbal sounds to signal that it is doing something.\n- \n[Earcons (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earcon) . \"An earcon is a\nbrief, distinctive sound that represents a specific event or conveys other\ninformation.\"\n\nCopyright © 2026 by Robert Church", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-clanking-turn-your-coding-agents-activity-into-a-subtle-soundscape", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/chrchr/clanking", "published_at": "2026-10-09 23:40:47+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-09 23:56:27.611378+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "developer-tools", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Clanking", "Robert Church", "Claude", "Codex", "PipeWire", "GTK 4", "Go", "Podman"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-clanking-turn-your-coding-agents-activity-into-a-subtle-soundscape", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-clanking-turn-your-coding-agents-activity-into-a-subtle-soundscape.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-clanking-turn-your-coding-agents-activity-into-a-subtle-soundscape.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-clanking-turn-your-coding-agents-activity-into-a-subtle-soundscape.jsonld"}}