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Stop babysitting your AI agents in the terminal — NockIt sends push alerts straight to your phone (Nockit)

#news #opensource #ai #automation

If you're running autonomous AI agents, fine-tuning scripts, or long background jobs, you know the drill: you hit enter, switch to another tab to work on something else, and then spend the next hour periodically flipping back to the terminal just to check if:

  1. It finished.
  2. It hit an unhandled exception 30 seconds after you looked away.
  3. It's waiting on user input or a permission prompt.

Watching lines of terminal output scroll by isn't a good use of anyone's time.

To solve this for my own workflow, I built NockIt—a free, open-source, plug-and-play notification utility that hooks into your local or remote AI agents and pushes real-time alerts directly to your phone or desktop via ntfy.

Learn More: https://nockit.uk

What it does

NockIt provides a simple, zero-bloat bridge between your autonomous dev pipelines and your devices.

  • 🔌 Plug & Play Integration: Add it to your execution loops or script completion hooks with minimal lines of code.
  • 📱 Powered by ntfy: Uses lightweight pub/sub push notifications—no clunky enterprise webhooks or complex bot setups required.
  • ⚡ Instant Event Pings: Receive push notifications for task completions, script failures, token budget limits, or required human-in-the-loop actions.
  • 🔓 100% Free & Open Source: Keep your tooling local and transparent.

Test Example

Instead of keeping your terminal pinned to your screen while your agent runs through an multi-step workflow, you can trigger a push alert when key state changes happen:

import requests

def notify_dev(title, message, priority="default"):
    requests.post(
        "https://ntfy.sh/your_custom_nockit_topic",
        data=message.encode('utf-8'),
        headers={
            "Title": title,
            "Priority": priority,
            "Tags": "robot,warning"
        }
    )

# Inside your agent's execution loop:
try:
    agent.run_task()
    notify_dev("Agent Finished!", "Task completed successfully without errors.")
except Exception as e:
    notify_dev("Agent Crashed 🚨", f"Error encountered: {str(e)}", priority="high")
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Ofc, no one wants to write such long code! Just set it up via a single command (requires Node Js installed):

npx -y nockit-mcp@latest setup
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Give it a try

I'd love for the community to test it out and share feedback!

Drop a comment below and share your experience—what's your current setup for monitoring long-running background tasks or AI scripts, and what features would make your workflow easier?

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