When I let Claude Code hammer away in the background while I work on something else, it regularly drifts into the weeds. By the time I notice, it may have spent many minutes pushing in the wrong direction. If I had just noticed earlier...

Luckily, you can install a baby monitor quite easily on macOS by adding the following instructions to CLAUDE.md (or AGENT.md for opencode, etc.):

  Whenever you
  – make important progress
  – get stuck on the same issue repeatedly, or
  – finish the task
  use the `say` command to tell me what’s going on.

With those three checkpoints I get timely, audible status updates, so I can jump in, redirect, or sign off without babysitting a terminal window.