Vitals 1.12: Vitals in the notch

A coding agent stops and waits whenever it needs your permission, and you find out when you next look at its terminal. With Vitals connected, the request comes to you: a black panel grows out of the notch with the agent, the project, and the command or file it is asking about.

• Allow lets it go on.
• Always Allow keeps the rule Claude Code itself suggests, such as allowing npm test in this project. The line under the buttons says what it keeps.
• Deny refuses it.
• Answer in Terminal leaves the request to the agent’s own window and brings that window forward.

The panel never takes the keyboard from the app you are in, and it is left out of screenshots and screen sharing.

1. 01 Open Settings → Integrations and find Coding Agents.
2. 02 Click Connect… beside Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI. Vitals shows the hooks it will add to the agent’s settings file.
3. 03 Click Connect. Sessions that are already running pick the hooks up when they start again.

Vitals shows the hooks before it adds them, and keeps a copy of the settings file from before, ending in .before-vitals. Disconnect takes the hooks out again and leaves the file as it was.

With three sessions asking at once, it is easy to allow the wrong one. Each project has a colour of its own, on its name beside the notch and down the edge of the command. After the headline, the notch says how many more are waiting and from which projects.

The answers take no click for the first moment a request is on screen, so a second click meant for the last request does not answer the next one. A long project name widens the panel, and a very long one has its folder written in full under the header.

When Claude Code asks you a question with choices, the choices appear in the notch, each with what it means. A click answers a question that takes one choice. One that takes several has Next, and Done on the last.

To type an answer of your own, choose Answer in Terminal.

A request from Codex has Allow and Deny. Gemini CLI can only be answered in its own window, so the notch tells you it is waiting, with the command, and Show Terminal brings forward the app it runs in.

Codex runs new hooks only once you trust them: in Codex, open Settings → Hooks, or type /hooks.

With an agent connected, the Agents tab and the dropdown say what each session is doing, in the agent’s own words: Running npm test, Thinking, Needs your OK, Asked you a question or Stopped at a usage limit.

A turn that took 30 seconds or more ends with a line in the notch: the agent, the project, how long it took, and any dev servers it left running with the memory they hold.

Both can be turned off under Coding Agents, with Ask for Permissions in the Notch and Show When a Turn Finishes.

An insight used to wait under Worth a Look, or arrive as a notification that was easy to miss. One that needs you now comes out of the notch: the Mac running out of memory or running hot, an app over a limit you set, an app that keeps growing in memory or keeps the CPU busy, dev servers left idle, and a stuck command.

Beside the notch is the number the alert is about, as it is now, after a short line of how it got there.

• Quit quits the app the way ⌘Q does, so it can ask you to save. When the Mac is out of memory, it offers the app using the most.
• Not Today mutes alerts about that app until tomorrow.
• Show opens Vitals on the right tab, with the app open.

An alert goes after nine seconds unless the pointer is on it. At most one comes every two minutes, except for running out of memory and running hot, and none comes over an app in full screen.

An alert about an app shows the app’s icon with the kind of alert on its corner, and the app’s own number beside the notch: its memory, or its share of the CPU.

Settings → Insights has Show Insights where Send Notifications was, with three choices: In the Notch, As Notifications and Only in Vitals. If you had turned notifications off, you start on Only in Vitals. Everyone else starts on the notch.

Heavy disk or network use and a busy Neural Engine are worth reading but rarely worth stopping for, so they come as notifications, where macOS allows them.

On a Mac without a notch, or a MacBook with its lid closed, requests and alerts are a card that comes down from under Vitals in the menu bar, on the screen the menu bar item is on.