knock-knock - Let your AI agent reach your phone via ntfy - setup, CJK encoding pitfalls, when-to-call discipline.

Mirrored in three places, same version everywhere: Hugging Face (you are here) · GitLab · GitHub

Get the files - GitLab is the most reliable plain-git route:

git clone https://gitlab.com/LucioLiu/knock-knock.git

# or from this page
hf download LucioLiu/knock-knock --repo-type dataset --local-dir ./knock-knock

Then drop the folder into your agent's skills directory - ~/.claude/skills/knock-knock/ for Claude Code, ~/.agents/skills/knock-knock/ for Codex, or your client's equivalent.

Note: links to github.com inside the text below point to the GitHub mirror; if one does not resolve, use the GitLab mirror above - it carries the same content.

Licence: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 - the LICENSE file in this repo is authoritative.

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English | 简体中文

knock-knock · teach your agent to knock 📱

Let an agent reach its owner's phone via ntfy push — plus the discipline of when to call vs. when not to disturb.

knock-knock teaches an AI agent to notify your phone when a long task finishes or gets blocked — via free, no-signup ntfy.sh push. It ships battle-tested send methods (PowerShell / curl, with CJK-encoding fixes), plus a calling discipline: when to ping the owner, and when to stay quiet.

What it solves

You set an agent off on a long task and go do something else. The task finishes (or gets stuck and needs your call) — the agent can only wait, and you have no idea it's time to check back in. Without a notification channel, asynchronous collaboration is just talk. With a notification channel but no discipline, the agent turns into a nuisance.

flowchart LR
    A[agent runs a long task] --> B{task done or stuck?}
    B -->|done, owner is away| C[worth pinging ✅]
    B -->|blocked by a hard gate only the owner can clear| C
    B -->|can resolve it itself / pure progress update| D[stay quiet 🤫 keep working]
    C --> E[HTTP request → ntfy.sh]
    E --> F[📱 phone gets the push]
    D -.don't re-ping the same thing.-> B

This skill gives an agent two things:

1. The technical access path (free, no signup, three steps end to end: install the app on your phone → subscribe to a private topic → the agent fires one HTTP request) Built on ntfy.sh. The skill ships two send methods, PowerShell and curl (verified working and debugged on both Windows PowerShell and bash), including the life-saving fix for CJK-encoding pitfalls (sending Chinese straight through a command line usually turns it into question marks — we hit that, fixed it, and wrote it down clearly).

2. The calling discipline (anti-nuisance)

• Worth pinging: the task is done and the owner is away / a hard gate is blocking progress and only the owner can clear it / the owner explicitly said "ping me when it's done"
• Not worth pinging: anything the agent can resolve itself / a pure progress update / re-pinging about the same thing
• Principle: a notification is the uplink channel for async collaboration, not a horn for announcing your presence.

3. Battle scars (seven real pitfalls we actually hit) Requests getting cut off by timeouts (the main process kill the send inside a hook before the server ever received it — and it looks a lot like an encoding bug), a three-part body-length pitfall (Chinese text eats more screen width / "flatten first, then truncate" can cut straight through a table into wreckage / the ntfy Android app has its own truncation bug), notification steps must be exception-isolated, "a turn ending" ≠ "the task is done" (reporting a turn-level event as task completion is a false victory lap — check the task's real state before sending), duplicate sends from stacked hook configs, background sends need a receipt log, and don't hard-code the notification identity across multiple harnesses — details are in SKILL.md, dodge them accordingly.

Install

Option 1 · GitHub CLI

gh skill install LucioLiu/knock-knock knock-knock --agent claude-code --scope user

Option 2 · Manual: copy SKILL.md to ~/.claude/skills/knock-knock/SKILL.md (no update channel — revisit this page when a new version ships). Chinese-speaking users should copy SKILL.zh-CN.md instead and rename it to SKILL.md locally.

Other tools: SKILL.md is a plain, portable markdown guide — feed it to any LLM tool.

Uninstall: just delete the ~/.claude/skills/knock-knock/ directory — nothing left behind.

Part of the capability-block architecture behind the Nuwa digital-employee framework — more blocks in the "Ecosystem · Capability Blocks" section of the main Nuwa repo's README.

Companion blocks (sibling skills, take what you need)

• handoff-protocol — the discipline for multi-agent collaboration and handoff; agents should call each other for agent-to-agent work, and reach for this block only when a human is genuinely needed.

Version & updates

Current version 1.3.0 (see .claude-plugin/plugin.json). Updates are always published to this repo; manual-copy users should revisit this page and compare version numbers.

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for personal and non-commercial use.

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Both language editions are maintained in sync. If they ever diverge, the Chinese edition is authoritative — please open an issue if you spot one.