Claude Code Stop / Notification hooks — never alt-tab back to a frozen CC again

Configure Claude Code's Stop and Notification hooks in ~/.claude/settings.json to shell out to osascript (or a TTS script, Hammerspoon, Starcraft sound effects — pick your aesthetic) whenever CC finishes a task or asks for input. Result: you alt-tab away to other work and get a native banner the second CC needs you back, instead of discovering 8 minutes later that it was idle the whole time.

The default failure mode for heavy CC users is to launch a long task, switch tabs, and come back 20 minutes later to find CC stuck on a permission prompt at minute 2. Hooks reclaim those minutes per task — directly proportional to how many parallel CC sessions you run.

1. Open ~/.claude/settings.json (or create it). Add hooks for Stop and Notification that shell out to osascript -e 'display notification "..."' with the message and the project path.
2. Optionally make the notification clickable — deep-link to the project folder so a click takes you back to the right terminal/tab.
3. Pick a variant that fits how you work: native macOS notifications (default), TTS via claude-code-tts so you can hear which agent finished while looking elsewhere, Hammerspoon corner-of-screen notifications (less intrusive than TTS), or Starcraft sound effects (memorable per-event sounds for parallel sessions).
4. Reference recipe: search for current community write-ups on Claude Code hooks for macOS notifications — for the exact JSON shape.
5. Test by running a CC command that prompts for permission; confirm the notification fires.
6. Stack with an outer-loop "promise tag" pattern (Stop hook re-prompts CC until output contains a <promise>COMPLETE</promise> sentinel) if you want CC to grind on long tasks without supervision.

• The Claude Code VSCode extension doesn't fire the hooks reliably as of late 2025 (anthropics/claude-code issue #11156). Run CC in terminal — the same hooks work, the notifications fire, and multiple operators independently report this as one more reason to switch back to the terminal.