task-progress

task-progress

Sends mid-task progress updates to the channel a task came from (Slack, Discord, or Telegram).

Critical rule — if you notify, notify BEFORE any work begins

For tasks that need a progress update, call notify.py as the FIRST action after reading the task — before transcription, web searches, code reads, or any other tool call. The user's first signal that you received a long-running task must be the notification, not silence followed by a result minutes later.

Critical rule — progress only, never final answers

notify.py is only for short progress/status updates. Do not use it to send the answer, findings, recommendations, completed list, PR summary, or any other final result. Final task delivery must go through the authoritative task result file (results/task-<id>.txt, or the channel-specific result path named in the task).

Keep notify bodies short: at most 280 characters and 4 non-empty lines. The script rejects longer messages so a final answer cannot accidentally be sent directly and then duplicated by the bridge when it delivers the result file.

If you already sent the final answer through another approved path, write [REPLIED] to the task result file so the bridge archives the task without sending a duplicate.

Voice message tasks (most common failure case)

When a task contains a voice attachment ([File attached: ...]), notify BEFORE calling the transcription script. Transcription takes 10–30 seconds — the user should not wait in silence.

Wrong order:

1. Read task (sees voice attachment)
2. Call transcribe.py ← 20s of silence
3. Process transcript
4. Return result ← user waited 60+ seconds with no signal

Correct order:

1. Read task (sees voice attachment)
2. Notify: "Got your voice message, give me a moment." ← user knows within seconds
3. Call transcribe.py
4. Process — if research needed, notify again before starting
5. Return result

All other long-running tasks

Wrong order:

1. Read task
2. Do research (WebSearch, WebFetch, file reads, analysis...)
3. ← user waits 2 min with no signal
4. Notify "on it"
5. Return result

Correct order:

1. Read task
2. Notify immediately ← user knows you got it within seconds
3. Do research / work
4. Notify at key checkpoints
5. Return result

When to notify

Notify at task-start when any of these apply:

• Research questions (web search, reading files, looking things up)
• Code changes (editing, writing, testing)
• PRs (opening, reviewing, updating)
• Multi-step analysis (GTM strategy, architecture review, brainstorming)
• Anything that will take more than ~60 seconds before the result appears

No notification needed for:

• A factual answer you can give immediately from memory
• A one-sentence reply

When in doubt, notify. A false positive (notifying for a 30-second task) is far less annoying than silence for 2 minutes on a research task.

How to use

Read the task file to get source and channel_id (or chat_id for Telegram), then call immediately after reading the task:

python3 $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/skills/task-progress/scripts/notify.py \
  --source slack \
  --channel-id D0B5L7X2TK2 \
  --message "On it — looking into that now. Back in a minute."

For research tasks, be specific about what you're doing:

  --message "Researching Trigify setup time now — back in a minute."

For a Slack @mention (threaded reply), add --thread-ts <ts> to keep the update in-thread.

Mid-task checkpoint update:

python3 $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/skills/task-progress/scripts/notify.py \
  --source slack \
  --channel-id D0B5L7X2TK2 \
  --message "Done with the research — writing up the summary now."

Field mapping from task files

Optional for Slack @mentions: reply_thread_ts: → --thread-ts

Supported channels

• Slack — chat.postMessage, token from $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/channels/slack/.env (SLACK_BOT_TOKEN)
• Discord — REST v10 messages, token from $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/channels/discord/.env (DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN)
• Telegram — sendMessage, token from $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/channels/telegram/.env (TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN)

Discord mentions

Discord mention validation is on by default. Use a resolved user snowflake (<@USER_ID>), not a GitHub-style @handle. Before posting, notify.py checks each user ID through Discord; after posting, it verifies the response's mentions array. An unresolved mention exits 1 with an agent-visible error.

For intentional plain-text handles that should not ping anyone, pass --no-validate-mentions.

Fail-open

A failed send (missing token, network error) prints a warning to stderr and exits 1. Always continue working on the task regardless of exit code. The notification is best-effort — task delivery via the result file is the authoritative path.