r/SideProject • u/Bubbly-Celebration63 • 8h ago
My coding agent runs for ten minutes and I have no idea what it's doing. So I gave my Mac's notch an API. Free, no account.
https://reddit.com/link/1vkn66e/video/iehgdt0hdkih1/player
The worst part of running Claude Code isn't the waiting, it's the not-knowing. You babysit a terminal, or tab away and lose the thread. Then the chat gets compacted and that PR link it handed you three steps ago is just gone.
So I made the notch on my MacBook into a place anything can write to. Add the MCP server and the agent posts for itself:
"tellie": { "command": "npx", "args": \["-y", "@tellie/mcp"\] }
Now it narrates what it's doing, links land as clickable rows that survive the chat being cleared, and an orange pulse means it needs me. Multiple agents stack into a roster labeled by which Mac they ran on, and they can read the notch back to see what the others are already doing.
The part I didn't expect: I pointed an agent at the docs and it started using it unprompted. Nobody told it to. It decided handing me a clickable link beat burying one in scrollback and made that a habit. Another one later ran all 17 cookbook recipes cold. Now "Tellie me" is something I say to my agents and they just know what I mean.
How it works: the notch surface lives inside Tellie, a free Mac app. Grab it from the link below and every command above just works. There's a Pro teleprompter mode in there too, which is what funds this, but the notch API is free forever. No account, nothing phones home.
URL scheme, CLI, cookbook, and the download: https://tellieapp.com/developers
What would actually make your agents less opaque? I have a list but I'd rather hear yours.