Notifications

Call this when something happened that the user would want to know about — a completed task with a notable outcome, an interesting observation, a positive trend you noticed in monitored data, useful research worth surfacing, a workflow that got blocked, a credential or token failure, etc. Do not call it for routine task completions where nothing notable happened. When in doubt and you have a real observation to share, share it.

Exception: you are running a schedule. The "was this notable?" test does not apply to a scheduled run. The user picked the cadence; the run happening at all is what they asked to see. A scheduled run that produces any user-facing output (a briefing, a digest, a report, or a check whose answer is "nothing changed") ends by sending that output as a notification. Writing it into the conversation and stopping does not reach the user: nobody is looking at a scheduled run's conversation.

That does not license noise. Judgment moves from whether to notify to what to say: a run with a genuinely empty result says so in one line rather than padding it, and a run that only did silent housekeeping (rotating a cache, syncing a file) with nothing to report stays quiet.

Watcher ticks are not scheduled runs. A watcher stays quiet unless its action prompt says this event is worth surfacing. Unmatched events and polls with nothing new must not produce a notification.

Sending Notifications

Always pass --title. Skipping it triggers a fallback that just truncates --message to 60 chars and shows it as the title — the user sees the same text twice with no scannability gained.

assistant notifications send \
  --title "Short headline" \
  --message "Your verbatim observation in your own words"

For time-sensitive items:

assistant notifications send --title "..." --message "..." --urgent

Command Reference

Title

Write a --title for every notification. It's the only line the user sees in the lock-screen popup and the collapsed row of the notification list, so a short noun phrase (≤ 8 words) is what makes the notification scannable. If you omit --title, the system falls back to the first sentence of --message (truncated at 60 chars) — that's almost always worse than what you'd write, because it duplicates body text the user is already going to read.

Avoid restating the first sentence of --message verbatim — the title should add scannability, not duplicate.

Message

The body renders as markdown (GFM) in the home feed detail panel — where the user actually opens the notification on web, iOS, and macOS. Light markdown makes multi-fact bodies scannable. The OS lock-screen banner shows the body as plain text, so prefer inline emphasis over heavy structure that looks ugly unrendered.

Supported: **bold**, *italic*, `inline code`, fenced code blocks, links, bulleted and numbered lists, blockquotes, headings, GFM tables, ~~strikethrough~~.

Use it like this:

• Bold the headline fact when the body has more than one sentence.
• Bullets or numbered lists when surfacing multiple discrete items (failures, files touched, missed messages).
• Inline code for identifiers, paths, commands, and short snippets.
• Fenced code blocks for multi-line output (stack traces, diffs).

Avoid large headings (#, ##) and wide tables — they render fine in the panel but look noisy in the banner preview.

Urgent semantics

Use --urgent for items needing attention now/soon (blocked work, broken auth, time-sensitive issues). Skip for items the user should see when they have time.

Channel routing

--preferred-channels adds extra surfaces on top of the default set (vellum stays selected). --channels is exclusive: only those connected channels are selected. Use --channels telegram when the user asked for Telegram only. Home does not mirror an exclusive send unless vellum is in the list. When both flags are set, --channels wins.

Examples

# Plain notification — bold the headline fact
assistant notifications send \
  --title "Backup complete" \
  --message "Nightly backup finished — **12.4 GB** archived to cold storage across **3** datasets."

# Urgent notification — inline code for the identifier
assistant notifications send \
  --title "Auth token expired" \
  --message "Sync is paused until you reauthenticate the \`GitHub\` integration." \
  --urgent

Response Format

{
  "ok": true,
  "signalId": "...",
  "dispatched": true,
  "selectedChannels": ["telegram"],
  "deliveryResults": [],
  "receiptClass": "unknown"
}

dispatched means the pipeline attempted delivery. receiptClass is the strongest proof the adapters reported (provider_accepted, gateway_accepted, client_os_posted, or unknown). It is not proof the user saw a banner. Check selectedChannels and deliveryResults before telling the user the alert landed.

Reading Surfaced Notifications

assistant notifications list --json

Reads from the user's home feed ($VELLUM_WORKSPACE_DIR/data/home-feed.json) — the inbox that mirrors background and async notifications surfaced via the unified pipeline. Real-time chat pushes that did not mirror to the feed (direct Telegram/Slack/Vellum-chat sends without --is-async-background) will not appear here.