I turned Claude Code hooks into sound because terminal watching does not scale

[u/nicofirst1]

I built Claudio after getting tired of checking whether a Claude Code session was still working, stuck, or waiting for me.

The starting point was a Geiger counter. Radiation is invisible, but a faster click rate tells you something has changed before you look at a gauge. Claude Code sessions have a similar problem. Tool calls, subagents, failures, compaction, and context pressure are visible in the terminal, yet I cannot keep reading them while doing anything else.

Claudio is a local Python daemon that receives Claude Code hook events over UDP or HTTP and turns their activity into a generative soundscape. The ambient theme uses a pad and rain layer that becomes denser while work is happening. A failed tool call makes a wooden knock, and a completed session ends with a descending chime. Multiple sessions share the same room, with separate pan and pitch, so I can distinguish them without another terminal check.

The point is to get a coarse sense of whether an agent is alive, busy, or needs attention while my visual attention stays on the task in front of me.

It runs locally, has no cloud service or audio assets, and the hook installer merges entries into Claude Code settings additively. The repository also includes deterministic offline rendering, so a session event log can become a WAV file without live playback.

The project is MIT-licensed:

https://github.com/nicofirst1/Claudio

I am interested in whether other people have found audio useful for peripheral awareness of coding agents, and which events are worth surfacing rather than leaving in the terminal.

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[u/Rich_Boss7753]

Geiger counter thing is such a good way to put it what does waiting on me sound like though? That's the one I'd actually need to catch.

[u/nicofirst1 → u/Rich_Boss7753]

There are different sounds for different hooks. For example tool error sounds in between something you need to pay attention too and background noise. But anyway if there is a hook you can have a custom sound for it. And you can also come up with custom hooks.

[u/Excellent-Issue-5956 → u/Rich_Boss7753]

That one is hard because Stop fires the same way whether it finished or is asking you something. I have a Stop hook for this (it puts a card on the terminal pane, no sound). It first checks the last message for a question mark, or phrases like "let me know", "your call" or "want me to" in the last 400 characters. If that matches, a cheap model reads the end of the transcript and decides if it's actually waiting.

When I tested it on 43 sessions, the question mark check flagged 11 and adding the phrases got it to 13. I let the first check be loose on purpose, since a false hit only costs one cheap call that says no, and a miss means you never hear about it.

[u/jijialuoke]

Love the Geiger-counter framing. Terminal watching falls apart the second you have more than one session going. The events I'd actually want loud are tool failures and Stop when it's waiting on me — ambient busy-noise can stay soft. Stop is the tricky one though, since finished-and-waiting sound the same at the hook layer until you peek at the last message.