Show HN: Clanking – Turn your coding agents' activity into a subtle soundscape

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.

For machines called "clankers", LLM agents sure don't make much noise. Are they too quiet? Yes But not anymore. Clanking 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. demo.mp4 Coding 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. Clanking 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. Clanking 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. You can configure the tempo and root note from the command line or Clanking's GTK 4 UI. Clanking requires a Unix-like system with PipeWire and the pw-cat utility. It has an optional GTK 4 user interface for configuration. Clanking is vibe-coded in Go and requires a Go toolchain and GTK 4 development libraries to build. On a Unix-like system with the required dependencies and an XDG-style desktop such as GNOME or KDE , make install installs clanking , clanking-ui , a desktop file, and an icon in your home directory. The included Containerfile lets you build Clanking without installing all the development dependencies on your system. The podman-make script builds and runs the container. Adapting it for Docker is left as an exercise for the reader or the reader's coding agent. With clanking and pw-cat in your $PATH on a system with PipeWire, you can configure your coding agent to invoke Clanking. For Claude, install the Clanking plugin from this repository's marketplace: /plugin install clanking --marketplace chrchr/clanking For Codex, add this repository as a plugin marketplace: codex plugin marketplace add chrchr/clanking codex plugin add clanking@clanking Restart Codex, then run /hooks . Trust the Clanking hooks. - 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. - Star Trek: The Next Generation https://youtu.be/Drr6 zikuZQ?si=BIBxn--yIwatbIYS . The voice-interactive computer in the "Star Trek" franchise uses nonverbal sounds to signal that it is doing something. - Earcons Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earcon . "An earcon is a brief, distinctive sound that represents a specific event or conveys other information." Copyright © 2026 by Robert Church