Agent notifications and offline push

An agent that is working needs nothing from you. The two moments that matter are when it turns blocked (it wants input) and when it turns done — and SigilTTY tells you about exactly those two, at three levels of distance from the app.

While SigilTTY is open

Whenever you have an attached agent session, SigilTTY watches its status. When an agent becomes blocked or done, you get a system notification, and the session’s tab badge changes color. Nothing is posted for any other transition — no noise while the agent simply works.

The global switch is Settings › General › Agent Notifications (on by default).

On iPhone models with a Dynamic Island, events that happen while the app is in the background show up there instead of as a banner: a persistent orange mark stays on the island until you come back to the app. See Live Activity.

Offline push: alerts while SigilTTY is closed

Attached sessions end when the app is suspended — but your agents keep running on the server. With offline push enabled for a server, that server can reach you on the Lock Screen even when SigilTTY isn’t running at all: “deploy-fix finished”, straight from your own machine.

Turning it on

Open Herdr Agents… on the server and flip Offline notifications at the bottom of the panel. It is off by default, per server, and needs three things:

You have attached to at least one agent on this server before.
Notifications are allowed for SigilTTY.
You are currently connected to the server.

That’s the whole setup. SigilTTY uses the SSH connection you already have to place a small helper, sigiltty-watcher, on the server: the binary is downloaded for your server’s architecture from the project’s GitHub releases, verified against a checksum pinned inside the app, and started — nothing to install by hand. (The host needs curl or wget and a SHA-256 tool, which practically every Linux box has.)

The helper deliberately expires after 7 days; every time you connect to the server, SigilTTY renews it. If the server reboots, the helper comes back the next time you connect. The panel shows its health at a glance — for example “Deployed 0.1.4 · renews in 6d”.

What a notification looks like

The title is the event — “«agent» finished” or “«agent» needs attention” — with the server as the subtitle and the pane label as the body. Repeated events from the same agent replace each other instead of stacking up.

Tapping one does the obvious thing: if a live attached session exists, it is focused; otherwise the Agents list opens with that agent highlighted, one tap from reattaching. SigilTTY never opens an SSH connection by itself from a cold start — reattaching is always your action, so Face ID prompts and host key checks happen when you expect them.

Turning it off

Flip the switch off and SigilTTY uninstalls the helper from the server — configuration, lock file and log included.

Privacy

Offline push is built so that operating a relay server does not mean reading your notifications:

End-to-end encrypted. The helper on your server encrypts every event to your device’s public key (HPKE). Only your device — in fact, only the notification extension on your device — can decrypt it.
The relay is zero-knowledge. It forwards ciphertext to Apple’s push service and sees only an anonymous routing identifier — no account, no email, no server names, no agent names.
No account. Devices register anonymously; registrations that go unused for 30 days are deleted.
Your keys stay put. The decryption key is generated on your device, lives in its Keychain, and never syncs anywhere. The server holds only the public half.
Everything is auditable. The helper (sigiltty-watcher, Rust) and the relay are both open source at github.com/SigilTTY/sigiltty-relay, protocol documentation included. Don’t take our word for any of the above — security audits are welcome.
Self-hosting is supported. Point SigilTTY at your own relay if you’d rather not use ours.