peon-ping

peon-ping allows you to play an iconic game voice line and pop a desktop banner when your AI coding agent finishes a task, hits an error, or needs your input. There is a whole site with many different sound packs available for it now, but at heart it is a small tool that allows your agent to communicate sounds and notifications.

Hear a peon

The name comes from the Warcraft III Orc Peon. My own default is the StarCraft SCV. Hit a line to hear what both packs sound like.

Warcraft III Orc Peon

Ready to work?session start Work, work.task picked up Something need doing?needs input Hmm?needs input Me not that kind of orc!error Me busy, leave me alone!too many pings

StarCraft SCV

SCV good to go, sirsession start Job's finishedtask done Yes, sir?needs input Orders, Cap'n?needs input Somethin's in the wayerror They put me in one of these things!too many pings

Sounds from the peon and sc_scv packs (openpeon.com).

The problem I was having

I kept running into the same thing: I would give a coding agent inside VS Code a big instruction, expect it to work for a few minutes, and in the mean time I would move my attention to another window. Then I would come back later and find it had stalled thirty seconds in, waiting on input.

At some point I just told the agent: "ping me if you need me." But, it had no way to do that just yet. So I went looking for a tool to allow my coding agent to "ping me"m, I found peon-ping, and the 90s gaming sound packs I recognized made me love it instantly. Now when I tell an agent to turn on alerts, it actually can.

How I have it wired up

I use it with the two agent harnesses I work in most, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI, both through their hook systems. The binary comes in through my dotfiles as a Homebrew tap, so a fresh laptop gets it automatically.

On top of that I built a small custom layer in my agents config repo:

• One alert-me skill instead of juggling separate commands, so any agent triggers it the same way.
• A gate in front of every hook event, so only sessions that opted in make noise and every other agent stays silent. Subagent events are dropped entirely.
• A CLI path (alert.sh done -m "..."), which is handy when I want the agent to ping me halfway through a plan, not only when the whole turn ends.

It sends both an audio clip and a desktop notification. The overlay banner shows the repo name and which harness it is, like .agents - Claude Code, so parallel agents stay distinguishable.

Personalizing each agent

peon-ping ships 165+ sound packs pulled from games like Warcraft III, Red Alert 2, StarCraft II, and Counter-Strike. I decided I wanted my agents to feel a little distinct, so I set the pack per project and per session. My default is the StarCraft SCV, and I rotate through a handful that all point at other things I like: Jarvis from Iron Man, GLaDOS from Portal, the Red Alert 2 SCV and Tanya, and the Warcraft III Peon.

There is an MCP server too, but I steer away from MCP in general because it is too token-hungry for my taste, so the per-session voice switching is something I wired up myself instead.

It is still quite a new project, but I expect I will be spreading the love on this one the same way I do with clipboard history.