I kept missing when Pi finished, so I made it notify my phone

I'd give Pi a coding task, switch over to a game, a video, or some other work, and lose track of it. Once I was doing something else, there wasn't a noticeable event to pull me back when the agent finished.

A task might take five minutes, but I might not remember to return for twenty. Pi wasn't taking twenty minutes. It had been done for fifteen, waiting for me while I was still playing. That was the time I wanted to cut down, rather than the time the agent actually spent working.

I didn't need a reminder that AI was running in the background. I needed something to interrupt me when there was a reason to come back: the task had finished, something had failed, or Pi needed an answer from me.

So I built pi-knock, my own open-source extension for the Pi coding agent. It sends notifications to your phone through Pushover or ntfy, with webhook support for other setups. One detail I cared about: completion alerts wait until Pi has finished its automatic retries and queued work. I don't want to stop what I'm doing, return to the terminal, and discover it's still going.

The motivation is pretty simple. If I'm halfway through a game, a message sitting in the terminal isn't going to get my attention. A notification on my phone can.

The code is here: https://github.com/Asigers/pi-knock

How do you handle the handoff back from an agent when you’ve switched to something else?