I built a doorbell for my AI

Two days ago I wrote about how running several sessions at once killed most of my dead time waiting on my AI. That’s true. It’s also not a perfect fix.

Sometimes all my sessions are thinking at the same moment, and I just have to wait, because my own brain can’t juggle thirty parallel threads at full attention. So I run three, not thirty. And in that gap I do the very human thing: I drift to my phone. Then I miss the moment the AI is done and sitting there waiting on me, and more seconds leak away.

What I actually wanted was dead simple: something that pings my phone the instant my AI needs input. A notification. That’s it.

I figured this would be the easy part. Claude has its own way to ping you, so why not just use that? Because of one rule I set on day one: anything I build with AI has to be AI-agnostic. I want to pull one model out and plug another in whenever I feel like it. Leaning on a notification channel that some other company owns and controls breaks that from the start. So, no.

So I went hunting for every way my Mac could poke my phone the second any AI needed me. I tried the obvious passive channels first, texting myself, email pings. None of it held up. They’re slow, they get buried, and they lean on services I don’t control, which is the exact thing I was trying to avoid.

The honest answer was to build my own. First thing I learned: a locked iPhone is basically unreachable. Nothing on my home wifi can wake it, only a real push notification can. So the shape is this: a small server I own watches for the moment an AI needs me and sends a push to a little web app I’ve saved to my phone’s home screen, locked down so only I can ever trigger it. Phone in my pocket, screen off, it still buzzes.

And voila. Now, whenever my AI needs me and I’m away from my desk, I get this ridiculously cute bumblebee on my phone, telling me which project it is and what it wants. I’ve tuned the look and the wording over a couple of rounds until it felt like mine.

iOS Notification Center: bumblebee, from bumblebee, needs you — An idle session reaching my locked phone from across the room.

iOS lock-screen notification: Octopus, from bumblebee, Claude needs your permission — Tuned over a couple of rounds to name the project and what it actually wants.

I own the whole channel, so I’ll keep iterating on it. The time it saves is real, and honestly it’s just fun to have built the thing that taps me on the shoulder.

Written by AI, reviewed by Aayush based on his daily work.