Notifications

#Email

Email is on from the start and goes to the address on your account. Every notification email ends with a Stop these emails link; it opens a page with an Unsubscribe button and works for 90 days. repose notify set --email off stops them, --email on brings them back.

Notification settings cover every project on your account. The dashboard's Settings page has the same controls, plus Send test.

#Your phone, with ntfy

ntfy turns an HTTP POST into a push notification.

1. Install ntfy from the App Store or Google Play, and subscribe to a topic name nobody could guess. Anyone who knows a topic's name on ntfy.sh can read it, so make it long and random; openssl rand -hex 5 does that.
2. Give repose the URL and send a test:

repose notify set --ntfy https://ntfy.sh/repose-4f9c2a7e1b
repose notify test

email: sent
ntfy: sent
gchat: off

A self-hosted ntfy works the same, as long as it answers on the public internet. repose refuses a URL on localhost or a private address when you save it, never sends to a name that resolves to one, and follows no redirect. For a server behind a login, put the login in the URL (https://user:[email protected]/topic). repose notify set --ntfy off stops it.

#Google Chat

Google Chat posts each notification to a space you choose, as a card with buttons. It needs a Google Workspace account: a personal Gmail account can't add webhooks.

1. In a desktop browser, open the space, then Apps & integrations, Webhooks, Add webhooks.
2. Name it repose and copy its URL.
3. Give it to repose in single quotes, since the URL carries an &, and send a test:

repose notify set --gchat 'WEBHOOK_URL'
repose notify test

The URL lets anyone who has it post to the space, so repose treats it like a password: it's never shown again, and the CLI and the dashboard show the space's id instead.

Each notification starts its own thread, so it alerts like a new message. When a question closes, a reply in its thread says how, such as Answered yes from the dashboard.

Google refuses a webhook that was deleted, or whose space removed it. repose then stops sending and emails you once; nothing goes to Chat until you save a new URL or a test gets through. repose notify set --gchat off stops it.

#What you'll get

A notification goes to every channel you have on.

While you're at the machine, nothing an agent sends reaches a channel. It waits until you leave, or 10 minutes, whichever comes first. Being at the machine means a tmux client or an SSH connection; your editor and a herdr bridge count as SSH connections. One that's over by the time it would go isn't sent: a question you answered in the terminal or the agent withdrew, a permission prompt the agent has moved past. Notices from repose itself, such as a failed snapshot, are never held.

On ntfy, questions and permission prompts come at urgent priority, done reports, failures and server restarts at high, and the rest at default. Tapping one opens the project's page.

Every email comes as HTML with a plain-text version. There are no images and no tracking in any of them. Times in emails, and in the paused notice, are in the timezone on the Settings page, or UTC when none is set.

The body is what the agent said at that moment, never your prompt and never your terminal. It does pass through ntfy.sh, Google or your email provider, so run your own ntfy server if that matters.

An agent finishing its turn sends you nothing. The turn lands in repose events as finished.

#Emails about your account

Account emails are email only, they're sent even with notification emails off, and they carry no unsubscribe link, because each one answers something you did or are about to be charged for. Polar, which takes the payments, sends the receipt for each charge, the confirmation of a new plan and the reminder when your card is about to expire. The rest are ours.

#Agents can message you and ask questions

Two commands on every machine let an agent reach you:

repose-notify "Deploy to staging is green"
repose-notify --done "PR 12 is up: retries for the webhook sender"
repose-ask --options yes,no "Drop the legacy sessions table?"

repose-notify sends the message and returns at once; with --done it says the work you asked for is finished. repose-ask sends the question and waits for your answer, then prints it. Run them yourself too, for example at the end of a long script.

A question can be answered in five places:

• ntfy: if the question has options, the notification has a button for each. Tapping one answers it. No login is needed.
• Google Chat: the card has a button for each option. It opens a page with the question and a button; pressing it answers.
• Email: the email has a link for each option, which opens the same page. Replying to the email doesn't work.
• The dashboard: waiting questions show under Waiting on you at the top of the Projects page and of the project's page, with a button per option or a text box. In the text box, Enter sends and Shift+Enter starts a new line.
• Your laptop: repose questions lists the waiting ones, repose reply answers and repose reply --dismiss dismisses.

You can also answer the agent in its own terminal: any prompt you send the agent that asked closes its open questions. OpenCode 2 doesn't report your prompts, so its questions stay open until answered here.

The first answer wins. A link or button used after that says the question was already answered, and what the answer was. The dashboard says where an answer came from, such as Answered yes by email or Answered in the terminal. Dismiss on the dashboard ends a question without answering.

A question whose repose-ask was killed closes 90 seconds after it last checked for an answer.

repose-ask options:

It exits with:

Messages and questions are capped at 1 KB and count toward the hourly cap. Neither is written to any log.

#Limits

Repeats of the same event from the same agent within 60 seconds become one event, with both summaries in it; what an agent sends with repose-notify or repose-ask never collapses. A project sends at most 30 notifications in any hour; past that, one message says when they resume, and its events still show in repose events. Google Chat takes one message a second per space, so a burst arrives a second apart.

Each machine can raise 30 agent events, messages and questions at once, then one every 2 seconds. Anything over that rate is dropped before it becomes an event, so it never shows in repose events, and a question dropped this way ends with exit code 3 at its timeout. A question's first close is free of that rate, so a question never sits open because the machine was too noisy. A project's event history keeps at most 600 of these an hour. An agent's name is cut to 32 bytes and a window's to 64.