field notes

interactive permission bubbles

• Allow / Deny buttons — permission requests pop a modal bubble with a green Allow and outlined Deny. No auto-dismiss; she waits for you.
• Attention choreography — big anticipation hop on arrival, then alternating wave / wiggle every five seconds until answered, so you notice even if you looked away.
• Claude Code integration — a PermissionRequest hook bridge routes CC's tool-permission prompts through Axol. She stays out of the way unless CC would have prompted otherwise.
• Answered history — every decision is logged to the Recent Alerts panel with a compact ✓ or ✕ chip alongside the source label.

remote approvals via neuromast

• Cloud approval endpoint — POST /app/api/permission/{source} parks a pending request and 202-accepts in under a second, so callers with tight webhook SLAs (Slack 3 s, Stripe 10 s) never block on a human.
• Optional inline hold — add "hold": 20 and the endpoint waits up to 25 s for the user's click before falling back to async; callers who can wait skip a polling round-trip.
• Decision polling — GET /app/api/decision/{id} returns allow / deny / pending / expired. Opaque id is its own auth — no secret needed on the hot read path.
• Per-service defaults — SERVICES_CONFIG env sets hold window + expiry per source; per-request fields still win.
• Lateral-line threading — the forwarder now detects kind: "permission" envelopes, posts them to Axol's local /permission (held open), and relays the decision back to neuromast. Drops cleanly through all five deploy targets; no Cloudflare-only primitives.

movement, mood, and little things

• Option-click to improvise — hold ⌥ and click Axol to play any idle on demand.
• Worry bubbles that breathe — density scales with the unseen backlog; tempo doubles when anything urgent is unanswered.
• Proper drag — absolute cursor-to-window tracking, so she stays under your cursor instead of drifting off.
• Load at startup in the right-click menu — writes a LaunchAgent, no manual launchctl dance.

docs

• New approval-flow section on remote alerts with a worked GitHub Actions deploy-gate example.

remote alerts

• neuromast — a tiny serverless webhook intake that parks inbound payloads in a queue behind tiered auth (per-source HMAC for GitHub / Stripe / generic, with a shared-key fallback).
• lateral-line — a 60-line bash forwarder on launchd that drains the queue into Axol's loopback port. At-least-once delivery; items stay queued while she's offline.
• Runtime-agnostic storage — neuromast runs on Cloudflare KV or Redis. A factory sniffs the env and picks the right backend.
• One-command installer at lateral-line/install.sh writes the launchd plist, wires env vars, and starts polling.
• Axol didn't change — remote alerts feed her existing adapter system, so a new webhook source is still just a JSON file.

three size modes

• Mini is new — a smaller character with a side bubble and a count badge on her gill.
• Micro (formerly compact) — a static character with a count badge. Out of the way when you need the screen real estate.
• ⌘-click cycles full → mini → micro → full. The current mode persists across launches.

five deploy guides

Neuromast runs on whichever platform you already pay for (or don't). Each guide is a one-command bootstrap.

new site content

• Remote alerts — an overview of the lateral-line architecture, with links out to each deploy guide.
• Plugin reference — a walkthrough of adapters, a catalog of the five built-ins (Claude Code, GitHub Actions, Sentry, Stripe, and the generic fallback), and a PR flow for contributing your own.
• This changelog. Hi.

repo reorg

• The Mac app lives in axol/ now — symmetric with neuromast/ and lateral-line/. Three deployable components side-by-side.
• Swift sources split out of the mega-file into Adapters.swift, AlertStore.swift, Envelope.swift, Server.swift, plus a tests/ suite.

meet Axol

• A cheerful pink axolotl lives in the corner of your screen. Drag her anywhere; she stays put across launches.
• Ambient life: bobbing, blinking, swaying gills, and subtle idle moves (peek, stretch, tilt, wiggle).
• Naps: she nods off every few minutes and wakes on a click, drag, or inbound alert. A z z z rises from her head while she dreams.
• Right-click menu for animation toggles, about, quit. Left-click for a cheerful quip. She hydrates.

loopback alerts

• POST JSON to 127.0.0.1:47329 and she pops a speech bubble. Remote connections are rejected at the socket.
• Envelope format: title, body, priority, icon, actions, context. Only title is required.
• Priorities: low / normal / high (worry bubbles rise) / urgent (bubble pins open until handled).
• Click-through actions: focus-pid, open-url, reveal-file, noop. Closed set — the validator quietly drops anything else.
• 17 named icons (SF Symbols plus the Claude and GitHub marks), or pass any emoji as a literal prefix.
• History panel: double-click for the recent list; click a row to re-run its action.

adapter framework

• Drop a JSON file into ~/Library/Application Support/Axol/adapters/ to translate any webhook shape into an envelope.
• Tiny template language: , dot-paths, , plus basename and trim filters.
• Predicate matching with match and skip_if; switch + cases for per-branch templates.
• Bundled Claude Code adapter out of the box — SessionStart, Notification (pins open for permission prompts), and Stop. Include X-Claude-PID to focus the right terminal.

mood

• A single quiet scalar reacts to alert volume and decays slowly.
• When she's wound up, she refuses to nap, picks agitated idles ("peek", "wiggle"), and swaps to a frazzled quip pool ("That's a lot.", "Gills are flaring.").
• Calm mood → gentle idles, hydration quips. You never see the number. It just shows up.

landing page

• A live hero demo on the homepage runs Axol through a hello → alerts → history script so you can see her in motion before downloading.
• Compact mode (⌘-click) introduced as a minimal footprint option. (Grew into the three-mode system in v2.)