Notchi

While an assistant is working you either sit watching its window or wander off and lose track of it. Notchi puts a small animated character in the notch at the top of your MacBook screen and changes it as the work changes: thinking, running something, stopped and waiting for your permission, done. Every session you have open gets its own character. Click the notch and it opens out to show how long the session has run and how much of your usage allowance is left. It only runs on a MacBook that actually has a notch, on macOS 15 or newer, which rules out plenty of machines.

Any time you set the assistant on something that will take minutes rather than seconds and you would rather glance up than keep checking. It is quickest at catching the moment it has stopped and is waiting on you to approve something, which is the easiest thing to miss.

1. Download the app from the releases page, linked from the project page in the sidebar, and drag Notchi into Applications. There is nothing to type.
2. Open it once. It connects itself to Claude Code and Codex, OpenAI's equivalent, whichever you have.
3. Skip the key. The character works without one; a key is only for the chat feature, it comes from Anthropic's or OpenAI's own website, and it spends your own credit every time it is used.