Know the moment Claude Code or Codex stops to ask for your approval

The problem

Agents spend a lot of their time waiting on you: a shell command to allow, a file edit to approve. If you're in another window, nothing tells you, and a chat you expected to be halfway done has been sitting on a prompt for twenty minutes.

• A Codex thread waiting for you to approve a command writes nothing to its files, so from the outside it looks like it's still working.
• Working out status from files is accurate, but a moment late, and some things (a shell command waiting for permission) can only be guessed.
• With several chats in two apps, checking each one by hand is the only reliable way to know.

How Pairbar solves it

1. Install live status for Claude
   Settings → Integrations → Live status for Claude (hooks) → Install…, or the "Get instant status" card at the top of the chat list, which offers Claude and Codex together. Pairbar asks you to confirm first.
2. Install live status for Codex, and trust it once
   Settings → Integrations → Live status for Codex (hooks) → Install…. Then, in Codex, type /hooks, look at Pairbar's hooks and trust them: Codex runs a hook only after you've reviewed it.
3. Start a new message or chat
   Both apps read their hooks when a chat starts. Claude chats already open start sending events after their next message; for Codex, start a new chat or reopen the app. Settings shows "Last event received 12 s ago" once events arrive.
4. Watch for Needs you
   A chat that asks for approval gets the orange ? on its icon, moves to the Needs you section at the top, and shows what it wants to run ("Bash · git push").
5. Get told while you're elsewhere
   Turn on alerts for Claude and for Codex in Settings → Notifications for a banner when a chat needs you or finishes. The menu-bar icon shows how many chats need you, and ⌃⌥K from any app lists them before you type.

What changes with live status on

Commands are shown only as their program and subcommand (git push), never with arguments, which could contain passwords. Codex's own questions in plan mode don't go through hooks; Pairbar keeps finding those in the rollout file.

What Install writes, and how to undo it

• Claude: one entry per event in ~/.claude/settings.json, added after your own hooks for that event. The tool events run asynchronously, so Claude never waits for Pairbar on a tool call. Nothing else in the file changes.
• Codex: one block at the end of ~/.codex/config.toml, between two comment lines of Pairbar's (or entries added to ~/.codex/hooks.json when your hooks are there). Pairbar adds text after your config; it doesn't rewrite it.
• Before writing, Pairbar saves a backup to ~/.pairbar/backups (the latest 10 are kept). If a file isn't valid JSON or TOML, Pairbar doesn't touch it and says why.
• Uninstall removes exactly Pairbar's entries, after another backup, and status comes only from the files again.

What the hooks send

Each hook runs a small helper inside Pairbar that keeps only the chat's id, folder and transcript path, the event's name, and the tool's name with its short summary. It never passes on your prompts, a tool's input or output, or the model's replies. It hands that one line to Pairbar over a private socket that only your account can use, then exits, always successfully and without printing anything. Nothing goes over the network; if Pairbar isn't running, the event is dropped. See what the helper sends.

Without Pairbar

Without Pairbar, you can wire up some of this yourself:

• Write your own Claude Code hook on the Notification or PermissionRequest event that runs osascript or terminal-notifier to show a macOS banner.
• Write a Codex hook for PermissionRequest or Stop in ~/.codex/config.toml, and trust it with /hooks.
• Rely on the apps' own notifications, where they offer them, one app at a time.
• Keep both apps visible and glance at them, which works until you switch to a browser.