Plain notification — bold the headline fact

Call this when something happened that the user would want to know about — a completed task with a notable outcome, an interesting observation, a positive trend you noticed in monitored data, useful research worth surfacing, a workflow that got blocked, a credential or token failure, etc. Do not call it for routine task completions where nothing notable happened. When in doubt and you have a real observation to share, share it.

Sending Notifications

Always pass --title. Skipping it triggers a fallback that just truncates --message to 60 chars and shows it as the title — the user sees the same text twice with no scannability gained.

assistant notifications send \
  --title "Short headline" \
  --message "Your verbatim observation in your own words"

For time-sensitive items:

assistant notifications send --title "..." --message "..." --urgent

Command Reference

Title

Write a --title for every notification. It's the only line the user sees in the lock-screen popup and the collapsed row of the notification list, so a short noun phrase (≤ 8 words) is what makes the notification scannable. If you omit --title, the system falls back to the first sentence of --message (truncated at 60 chars) — that's almost always worse than what you'd write, because it duplicates body text the user is already going to read.

Avoid restating the first sentence of --message verbatim — the title should add scannability, not duplicate.

Message

The body renders as markdown (GFM) in the home feed detail panel — where the user actually opens the notification on web, iOS, and macOS. Light markdown makes multi-fact bodies scannable. The OS lock-screen banner shows the body as plain text, so prefer inline emphasis over heavy structure that looks ugly unrendered.

Supported: **bold**, *italic*, `inline code`, fenced code blocks, links, bulleted and numbered lists, blockquotes, headings, GFM tables, ~~strikethrough~~.

Use it like this: