Re-prompt a Claude Code or Codex chat on a timer until CI is green

The problem

CI is the classic babysitting job. The agent pushes a fix, the pipeline takes 12 minutes, one job fails on something new, and the agent is sitting idle because nobody told it to look again. You end up setting a timer on your phone to come back and type "CI still red?" into the same chat.

The same pattern shows up for flaky deploys, long migrations and PR reviews that need another pass once comments land.

How Pairbar solves it

1. Open the chat's menu
   On the chat that's doing the work, click ⋯ (or right-click) and choose Check in every…, or press K with the menu open.
2. Write the message
   Make it self-contained, for example: "Run gh pr checks. If anything failed, read the log, fix it and push. If all checks passed, reply DONE on the last line."
3. Choose the timing
   Set Every to 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes and Up to anywhere from 3 to 48 times. Match the interval to how long your pipeline takes.
4. Set the stop word
   Stop on defaults to DONE. Leave it empty if you only want it to stop after the number of times.
5. Let it run
   A green ⟳ appears on the row. Active check-ins are listed at the bottom of the Workflows tab with Stop, and you get a notification when one stops or when a message couldn't be sent.

How the stop word is matched

The word must appear as a whole word, in any case, in the last lines of the reply, the same rule as a workflow step's condition. That avoids stopping by accident:

Claude and Codex behave differently

Worth knowing

• Each message is a real turn and uses your plan limits, just like typing it yourself. Every 10 minutes up to 18 times is up to three hours of nudges.
• Hiding a chat keeps its check-in; it ends only when the chat is gone.
• Check-ins run only while Pairbar is running, and pause while Pairbar is locked after the trial.
• Cloud chats have no transcript on your Mac, so they can't have check-ins.
• Check-ins are stored in ~/.config/pairbar/heartbeats.json, readable only by you.

Without Pairbar

Ways to do the same thing without Pairbar:

• Watch CI yourself with gh pr checks --watch, then go back to the chat when it finishes.
• A shell loop that resumes the session headlessly, e.g. claude -p --resume <session-id> "check CI…" followed by sleep 600, stopping when the output contains your word.
• Ask the agent to poll within one turn ("wait for CI and keep fixing"). This keeps one turn running for a long time.
• A CI notification (email, Slack) that reminds you to prompt the agent again.