BrainSnack

Get told the moment Claude needs you — and learn something while you wait.

It tells you when Claude wants you back

You give Claude a task. It works for a couple of minutes. You look away, and then you keep looking away, because nothing told you it had finished.

BrainSnack watches your Claude Code session and plays a sound the instant it needs you:

• 🔔 Claude needs input — a permission prompt, a question, a choice to make
• ✅ Claude is done — the turn finished, go read the diff or send the next prompt

No more tabbing back every thirty seconds to check. No more discovering ten minutes later that it stopped and has been sitting there waiting.

It works wherever you run Claude

Not just the terminal inside VS Code. Any Claude Code session on your machine rings the same bell:

• Claude Code in the VS Code integrated terminal
• Claude Code in iTerm, Terminal, Warp — any terminal window
• The Claude Code extension

Keep VS Code open and it notifies you regardless of where you actually typed the prompt.

And it gives you something worth reading meanwhile

Be honest about what happens during those two minutes: you open Instagram, X, Reddit, YouTube. You meant to look for thirty seconds. You come back four minutes after Claude finished.

BrainSnack puts a feed in your sidebar instead — short cards, each readable in the length of an actual wait:

The point isn't that this content beats the internet. It's that the sidebar has no escape hatch. It cannot become YouTube.

Filter it to what you actually work in — a Go developer never sees Python cards.

Setup

1. Install the extension.

2. Run this from the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P):

BrainSnack: Install Claude Code Hooks

3. Restart Claude Code so it picks them up.

That's it. The sidebar opens by itself when Claude starts working, and you'll hear it when Claude needs you.

If nothing happens

BrainSnack: Show Status

It tells you exactly which piece is missing rather than leaving you guessing — usually it's step 3, since Claude Code only reads its settings at startup.

Settings

Everything is under brainsnack.* in VS Code settings. The ones worth knowing:

Custom sounds

macOS plays a system sound by default. On Windows and Linux there is no default, so set sound.onWaiting and sound.onFinished to an absolute path.

Use a .wav file — it is the only format that plays on all three platforms. macOS also accepts .aiff, .mp3 and .m4a; Windows accepts nothing but .wav.

What it sends

Worth knowing before installing anything that lives in your editor:

• No telemetry. Nothing about you is transmitted, ever.
• One request every 15 minutes to fetch new cards — a plain GET of a public JSON file, with no identifiers attached.
• A local server on 127.0.0.1 that Claude Code posts state to. Nothing outside your machine can reach it.
• Installing hooks edits ~/.claude/settings.json, keeping everything already in it. BrainSnack: Remove Claude Code Hooks reverses it exactly.

Cards are generated by Claude and then reviewed by hand before publishing — a quiz with a wrong answer key is worse than no quiz at all.

Links

• Source
• Report an issue
• How it works — implementation notes, if you're curious

Built by Shikhar Gupta. MIT licensed.