[idea] Silence agent-done notifications for orchestrator-driven workers

[felipefdl]

idea / problem

I drive multi-step plan execution from a controller pane: create Herdr tabs/worktrees, agent start + agent prompt --wait for implementers and reviewers, keep focus on the controller with --no-focus.

Each worker finishing in a background tab/workspace fires completion attention (toast and/or sound). For a plan with many tasks and two review stages per task, that means a constant stream of "done" pings for work I am already waiting on via CLI, not for something I need to notice interactively.

What exists today:

• Global [ui.sound] / [ui.toast] (kills noise for everything, including agents I do care about)
• Per-kind [ui.sound.agents] (mutes every instance of that harness, not "only this worker")
• Toast delay (helps false/transient complete; not "this agent is supervised by another agent")

There is no first-class way to start or mark a single agent as silent for lifecycle notifications while leaving normal interactive agents noisy.

Related (different problems): #412 / #356 (delay), #486 (toast ergonomics), #488 / #370 (false or multi completion spam). I did not find an open request for per-agent or per-dispatch silence for orchestrated workers.

requested change

A way to suppress lifecycle attention (finished / needs-attention toast and sound) for specific agents that an orchestrator owns, without muting all agents or a whole harness kind.

Possible shapes (any of these would work; not prescribing the design):

1. herdr agent start ... --no-notify (or equivalent) so that agent does not raise finished/attention UI while it lives
2. A per-agent flag after start, e.g. mute notifications for this name/pane until exit
3. Config that scopes silence by agent name pattern or by "created via CLI for background tabs," if that is cleaner than flags

Controller/orchestrator still uses agent prompt --wait / agent wait for completion. Silence only the human-attention channel (sound/toast/system notify), not the lifecycle states the CLI already exposes.

why you want this

Orchestrator-driven workflows treat the controller as the only interactive agent. Worker tabs are leaf implementers; the controller already blocks on settle. Completion pings for those workers are false urgency and train me to ignore Herdr notifications when a real interactive agent actually needs attention.

[KyleCo76]

Same problem here, coming at it from a different direction, so a second data point plus one thing I ran into that might narrow the scope.

Mine is not a plan run. I have long lived pairs where one agent only ever reports to another agent, an orchestrator pane and its worker pane sitting side by side for days at a time. The worker finishing is a signal for the orchestrator, it is never a signal for me. That is worth flagging against shape 3 in your list, because keying off "created via CLI for background tabs" would miss panes like mine that I set up by hand and just leave running.

The reason none of the current levers help is that the worker and the agents I actually watch are all the same kind. They are all claude, so claude = "off" under [ui.sound.agents] would silence the ones I care about right along with the one I do not.

One thing I would add to your list of what exists today: the only agent aware notification setting is the sound one. [ui.toast] is a single global delivery switch with no agent dimension at all, so whatever shape this ends up taking probably has to cover the popup surface too or it only solves half of it.

Related, and I raise it only because it was my report: pane bells now forward to the outer terminal on master (#2453, PR #2498). Once that releases it gives background workers a third way to grab my attention, and it has no per agent control either.

For what it is worth the project already ships the principle. droid comes with sound off by default because it does its own notifications. This is the same idea at a finer grain.