Introducing Standby: notifications and agent management for Claude Code
If you use Claude Code, you know the rhythm. You give Claude a task. It works autonomously for minutes. And eventually it either finishes, hits a permission prompt, or errors out.
The problem is the gap. Claude is working, and you're waiting, but there's no good way to know when the wait is over. You tab back to the terminal. Nothing yet. You tab back to your browser. A minute later, you check again. Still working. Then you get deep into something on Slack, and when you finally check back, Claude has been sitting at a permission prompt for seven minutes.
Multiply that by three sessions across three projects, and it becomes a real productivity tax.
What Standby does
Standby is a native macOS menu bar app that gives you ambient awareness of every Claude Code session on your machine. One icon tells you everything:
- ⚡ 3 means three sessions are actively working
- ⚡ 1 🟡 means one session needs your input
- Click the icon to see a dashboard with every session's status, current action, and how long it's been running
When Claude needs your attention, Standby plays a configurable chime and sends a notification. Click the session row to jump straight to the right terminal window or Desktop app tab.
What it doesn't do
Standby doesn't read your code, your prompts, or Claude's responses. It sees event metadata only: which tool fired, which project, what status. All data stays on your Mac. Zero network calls. No accounts.
How it works
Standby registers lightweight hooks in Claude Code's settings.json that fire on every event: tool use, permission requests, session start/stop, subagent activity. Each hook runs a small binary (under 100KB) that exits in under 50ms, forwarding the event to Standby via a Unix domain socket.
On first launch, hooks install automatically. No JSON editing required.
Try it
Standby is available for macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon. The 7-day free trial includes all features. After that, it's a one-time $9 payment.
If you run Claude Code sessions that take more than a minute, give it a try. The context-switching tax is real, and we think Standby eliminates it.