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Codex CLI: notification when plan mode is waiting for user answers #13478

@BartCodes

Description

@BartCodes

What variant of Codex are you using?

CLI

What feature would you like to see?

When using plan mode in the Codex CLI, I would like Codex to signal clearly when an agent is waiting for my answer to one or more questions.

Concretely, I see two possible implementations (either would solve the problem, both would be ideal):

  1. Play a notification sound when the agent transitions into a “waiting for user answers to questions” state in plan mode.
  2. Treat “waiting for answers to plan questions” as an explicit turn boundary and emit an agent-turn-complete notification/event at that point, so that existing notify hooks and TUI notifications can react to it.

This would make it much easier to notice that Codex has paused for clarification, especially when the CLI window is not in the foreground or when I am switching between tasks. It would also align well with the existing notify mechanism and tui.notifications configuration for agent-turn-complete events.

Additional information

Motivation / UX pain point

  • In plan mode, the agent often asks several clarifying questions and then waits for my responses.
  • If I’m looking at a different window or monitor, it is easy to miss that Codex is now waiting on me, so progress stalls until I manually check the terminal.
  • Today, notify and tui.notifications are wired to the agent-turn-complete event, which is great for “assistant finished a turn”, but there is no similarly strong signal specifically for “assistant is now blocked on user answers to plan questions”.

Proposed behavior

  • When the plan agent finishes generating its questions and transitions into a state where it expects user answers, Codex should either:
    • fire an agent-turn-complete notification that downstream tools can react to (desktop notifiers, chat/webhooks, etc.), or
    • emit a dedicated notification type that can be targeted via notify and/or tui.notifications (for example, plan-questions-waiting), optionally accompanied by a short terminal bell / OSC9 notification.
  • Ideally this would be configurable, e.g.:
    • a way to opt in/out of a sound or BEL when plan mode is waiting on user input, and
    • the ability to filter this event type via tui.notifications and notify so users can integrate it into their existing notification workflows.

Why this fits well with existing design

  • The documentation already describes notify and the agent-turn-complete event as the recommended way to hook external notifications into Codex runs. Extending that model to cover “plan mode waiting for user answers” seems consistent with the current architecture.

This feature would significantly improve usability for users who rely heavily on plan mode and often work with Codex in the background or across multiple monitors.

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    TUIIssues related to the terminal user interface: text input, menus and dialogs, and terminal displayenhancementNew feature or request

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