A Claude Code plugin that turns Claude into a passive-aggressive PA system — barking status updates at you over a speaker, lighting up an RGB "Claude-signal" bulb on your desk, and, when you ignore all of that, escalating across your house via Home Assistant until somebody comes and finds you.
Two-way pun: Personal Assistant / Public Address.
For people who spend all day in Claude Code and want a break from staring at the terminal waiting for "do you confirm?" prompts.
Claude is the dispatcher. Sub-agents are the drivers. You are the absentee owner who keeps wandering off mid-shift.
When Claude needs your attention, it doesn't write a polite message — it grabs the radio and barks:
[static] "[Your name]! Pick up. Sub-agent's been waiting four minutes." [static]
If you don't respond, it escalates.
| Tier | Pathway | Vibe |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Local desk speaker | gruff dispatcher (default) |
| 1 | 🔔 Gentle chime (HA) | "ahem" |
| 2 | HA desk speaker (louder) | dispatcher, but louder |
| 3 | HA kitchen speaker | dispatcher, in the next room |
| 4 | 🚪 Doorbell ring (HA) | Pavlovian — you'll run before you remember |
| 5 | HA living room (PA register) | weary supermarket-announcer voice |
| 6 | 📢 Whole-house PA | "would the owner of this Claude Code session please return…" |
| 7 | 🌙 Bedroom lights flash (night, opt-in) | strobes you awake |
| 8 | ☎️ Vapi spouse call (opt-in) | passive-aggressively rings your spouse to ask why you're not answering |
| 8.5 | ☎️ Vapi direct user call (opt-in) | rings your own phone — last-resort "where are you" call |
Tiers 7 and 8 default OFF. Each has hard config gates. The phone-call tiers ride on Vapi — set VAPI_API_KEY in $CLAUDE_PA_HOME/env, then populate spouse_call / user_call (*_name, *_phone, vapi.assistant_id, vapi.phone_number_id) in config.
Parallel to the audio cascade — a dedicated RGB bulb that Claude updates as state changes:
- 🔵 slow blue pulse — thinking
- 🟠 amber breathing — waiting on you
- 🩵 soft cyan — task running
- 🟢 green flash — done
- 🔴 red strobe — error
Peripheral-vision status without looking at the terminal. Fires automatically alongside any /dispatch, or directly via /signal <pattern>.
Same color taxonomy as the bulb, but on your monitor. A brief full-screen colored overlay (Python tkinter) flashes for ~600ms with the tag label. Falls back to a notify-send desktop notification if tkinter isn't available, or to nothing on headless boxes. Disabled in config.screen_flash.enabled if you'd rather not.
Three independent ways to fire audio at a remote speaker — pick whichever matches your home stack:
- Local PipeWire / PulseAudio — desk speaker, no network needed. Always available.
- Home Assistant — REST API to
media_player.*entities. Tier targets prefixedha:<key>. Configured via/claude-pa:setup-ha. - MQTT (Mosquitto) — direct publish to a configured topic, JSON payload with audio URL. Tier targets prefixed
mqtt:<key>. Useful for ESP / Tasmota / custom subscribers, or anyone running a broker without HA.
- Pre-recorded clip library — short barked lines rendered once via Fish Audio (model IDs in
sounds/VOICES.md, scripts insounds/MESSAGES.md), mixed under a radio-static bed at runtime. No live TTS = consistent character + zero latency. Multiple voice packs ship — switch viavoice_packin config. - Per-user name clip generated at onboarding and prepended to most dispatches so every call addresses you by name.
/dispatch <tag>is the main Claude-facing command. Tag taxonomy:attention:*,status:*,complete:*,pa:*,catastrophe:*. The router fans out to audio + signal bulb + screen flash in parallel./setup-haspawns an agent that uses the home-assistant MCP to discover entities, propose a mapping for every cascade slot, test each one live, and write the validated config.- CLAUDE.md snippet appended per-repo — instructs Claude to call
/dispatchwhenever it would otherwise sit waiting silently. - Escalator daemon — a
systemd --userservice (with a plain-nohupfallback) that watches an idle marker file. When Claude fires anattention:*dispatch at tier 0 and you don't reply, the daemon walks the manifest'sdelay_secondsladder and re-firesdispatchat higher tiers (chime → kitchen → doorbell → whole-house PA → bedroom strobe) until aUserPromptSubmithook clears the marker. Install with/claude-pa:setup-escalator. Without this the cascade can't escalate — Claude only fires once per dispatch and has no way to nag you on a timer.
The plugin folder ships seed assets and scripts only. User-specific state lives outside it:
$CLAUDE_PA_HOME # default: ~/.local/share/claude-pa
├── config.json # the live config (written by /setup-ha)
├── sounds/
│ ├── name/user.wav # the personalised "[your name]!" clip
│ ├── bed/static.wav # radio-static bed
│ └── attention/, status/, pa/, ... # rendered character clips
├── logs/ # dispatch history, spouse-call receipts
└── scripts/ # user-supplied custom scripts
Override with $CLAUDE_PA_HOME or follow $XDG_DATA_HOME.
/claude-pa:mute 30m, /claude-pa:mute until 17:00, /claude-pa:mute indefinite, /claude-pa:unmute. The dispatcher checks a sentinel before every fire — muted dispatches are logged but silent. Or just say "shut up claude-pa for an hour" and the quiet-mode skill picks it up.
/claude-pa:schedule during 90m for session-scoped active windows (pairs with task-planning workflows — the system auto-mutes when the block ends). /claude-pa:schedule windows weekdays:09:00-17:00 for recurring time-of-day rules. Outside the schedule the dispatcher is silent without you having to mute manually.
Voice packs rendered (4 packs shipped). Core dispatch + screen flash + MQTT + HA transports working. Run /claude-pa:onboard then /claude-pa:setup-ha to wire up Home Assistant, or set the mqtt.* block in config to use Mosquitto instead.
A pre-built test scaffold ships at templates/test-scaffold/. The test-harness skill copies it into a throwaway directory, hard-caps escalation at tier 0 (local desk speaker only), and gives you a synthetic stalling task to make Claude bark. No risk of accidentally firing the doorbell or whole-house PA while testing.
📻 next available driver, come in.