Notifications
Push on your phone, Slack or Discord in your team channel — the moment an agent needs you.
Alkahest has one definition of "waiting on a human", and it reaches you three ways: the home journal when you look, a push notification on your phone when you don't, and a Slack or Discord webhook for the channel your team already watches.
What fires a notification
Four moments — the ones that stop work until a person answers:
| Fires when | |
|---|---|
| Question on a task | An agent asks something on one of your tasks (ask_task). Goes to the task's owner. |
| Question on an issue | A decision question is posted (ask_issue, or written on the web). Goes to whoever was @mentioned; with no mention, to the issue's assignee and its creator. |
| Issue assigned | An issue is handed to you — at creation, or by a later update. |
| Seat request | A member asks for an editor seat. Workspace owners/admins only. See Sharing & permissions. |
| Pro ending or renewing | Pro was set to end, the owner who keeps editing afterwards changed, Pro ended, or a scheduled end was withdrawn. Workspace owners only. |
You are never notified about your own action: ask a question on the web and everyone else on that issue hears about it, not you. Writes from your agent count as yours — a question your own agent asks is still addressed to you, which is the entire point.
The message carries the project, the subject, the question's first line, and a deep link:
❓ Decision needed in alkahest · Widget token policy "Rotate widget tokens on every deploy, or keep them long-lived?" — asked by claude alkahest.app/home/p/alkahest/issues
Push notifications
Push is per device, and you turn it on from the device you want pinged: Profile → Notifications → Turn on notifications. The browser asks for permission inside that click; allow it and the tap on a notification opens the exact issue or task.
Devices you've turned on are listed there, so a lost phone can be revoked from another one. Below the list, a checkbox per kind — all five are on by default; turn off the ones you don't want on that account.
On iPhone and iPad, Safari only allows push once the site is installed to the Home Screen: open alkahest.app in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen, then open it from the icon and turn notifications on there. In a normal Safari tab the button is replaced by this hint — iOS gives no other way.
Notifications about the same subject replace each other rather than stacking, so a burst of agent questions on one issue is one line on your lock screen, not twelve.
Slack / Discord
One webhook per project, for the channel your team already reads.
- Create a webhook. Discord — channel settings ⚙ → Integrations → Webhooks → New Webhook → copy the URL. Slack — create an app at api.slack.com/apps → enable Incoming Webhooks → Add New Webhook to Workspace → pick a channel → copy the URL.
- Paste it into your project. Go to Projects → hover the project → ⋯ → Notifications… → paste the URL → Save. Only a workspace owner/admin sees this menu.
- That's it. Alkahest detects Slack vs Discord from the URL. To turn it off, save an empty field.
The webhook posts once per event, whoever it was addressed to — it's a channel, not an inbox. Push is the personal half; these two are independent, and you can run either, both, or neither.
Webhook URLs are secrets — anyone holding one can post to your channel. Alkahest stores one per project, readable only by workspace owners/admins.
The terminal, too
Even with nothing configured, alkahest publish tells you what's waiting:
$ alkahest publish
[alkahest] published alkahest (map: main)
→ https://alkahest.app/p/alkahest/main
⏳ waiting on you: 1 decision → alkahest.app/home/p/alkahest/issues
Agent-driven sessions get the same information in the MCP publish result, so your agent will tell you directly.
Good to know
- Mentions and replies that aren't questions don't notify yet. They still show up in the bell and the journal — only the five kinds above leave the app. Email digests aren't built either.
- Delivery is best-effort: one attempt per channel, and a failure never breaks the write it rode on or re-fires later. Your home page always shows the same "needs you" list, notifications or not.
- Turning a device off (or losing it) changes nothing else — the queue is per person, the delivery is per device.