Summary

Communication tools (email, Slack, notifications) are listed in the tool categories but not implemented.

Design Spec Reference

• §11.1 Tool Categories — Communication row

Scope

• Notification tool
• Email tool (technology TBD)
• External messaging integration (technology TBD)
• BaseTool compliance with ToolCategory.COMMUNICATION

Notes

• Specific messaging platforms and APIs to be evaluated at implementation time — reference DESIGN_SPEC.md §18.1 Integration APIs

Research Context

ntfy.sh (2026-03-14) — Push notification service for operator alerts:

• Self-hostable HTTP-based pub/sub notification service (29.2k stars, Apache-2.0, Go)
• Integration: single async HTTP POST to publish to a topic
• Supports WebSocket, SSE, FCM, Web Push, email delivery
• Real gap identified: SynthOrg has no way to notify operators outside the web dashboard
• For: parked approval contexts (engine/approval_gate.py), budget threshold alerts (budget/enforcer.py), escalation chain notifications

Suggested pattern: NotificationSink protocol (async send(title, body, priority, tags) -> None) with pluggable implementations:

• NtfyNotificationSink (HTTP POST)
• SlackNotificationSink (webhook)
• EmailNotificationSink (SMTP)

Configure in company YAML under operator_notifications: section. See research/notification-sink-pattern.md in project memory.