BlackFlare - a native macOS menu bar app for Claude Code and Codex. Keep your Mac awake during long runs, get notified when a session finishes or needs you, switch your defaults from the menu, and watch plan usage — all on-device.
Ahoy, captains 👋
I'm Tin Nguyen, a pirate at The Black Flagger
You give Claude Code or Codex a real task and walk away. Two things go wrong.
Your Mac falls asleep, and your agent stops with it. Or it finishes in two minutes — and you find out at lunch. Worse, it got stuck on a small question after 30 seconds and waited for you the whole time.
BlackFlare closes both gaps. It's a small app that lives in your menu bar.
🔥 Your Mac stays awake while a session runs, and sleeps again when it's done. Long refactors finish while you're gone.
🔔 It pings you the second the agent finishes or gets stuck. On your Mac, or on Telegram or Slack so you can leave the desk and actually touch some grass. Works with Claude Code and Codex CLI in the terminal, VS Code, and JetBrains. You can tell it to stay quiet while you're sitting right there.
⚙️ Change your default configs from the menu. Model, permission mode, effort — one click, no flags to remember, no editing JSON by hand. It edits your config files carefully, backs them up first, and never reformats anything.
📊 See how much usage you have left on your plan, right in the menu bar, with a warning before you run low.
No account. No tracking. Nothing leaves your Mac. To show your real usage it reads your Claude token from the Keychain — read-only, and only if you turn it on. That token goes to Anthropic and nowhere else.
Works on macOS 13 or later, on both Intel and Apple silicon.
I'm here all day — tell me what your agents get up to while you're not watching. 🏴☠️
the backup-before-edit habit is good practice, curious about the concurrent case though. if you've got two sessions running that both trigger a default change around the same time, is there any locking on the config file, or is it last write wins? menu bar tools like this tend to get used with multiple terminals open at once, so it seems like the kind of race that'd only show up occasionally and be genuinely confusing when it did
Saw @AgentQuartz on the leaderboard today. Seems this has more features than that. Congrats on shipping.
Keeps my Mac awake during long Claude runs and the menu bar alerts actually saved me from missing a few finished sessions. Solid little utility.
the part that gives me pause isn't the notification logic, that seems well thought through in the replies above. it's that this edits config files directly, model, permission mode, effort, based on reading session state that Anthropic and OpenAI don't publish as a stable format. what happens the next time either of them changes how that session data is structured? does BlackFlare fail loud (stops editing, tells you it's out of date) or is there a risk it writes back a config edit based on a state it misread? backups before edits helps with the second case, but only if you notice something's off before you're relying on the wrong model or permission mode mid-run.
Keeping the Mac awake and pinging on completion is a small surface but it's solving the actual annoyance — long agent runs are exactly when you walk away, and walking away is what puts the machine to sleep.
How does it detect that a run finished? Watching process state, parsing terminal output, or hooking something more specific to each tool? I ask because the failure mode that would matter is a false completion — getting pinged, coming back, and finding it still going. That'd cost more trust than a missed notification would, and I'd guess process-level detection is more robust but less precise about what "done" means.
Nice one, already got it. Quick question though - how does "away" detection work?
This is exactly what I needed for overnight Claude Code runs. The menu bar presence is super clean and the wake-lock toggle saved me from constantly ssh-ing back to check. Watching plan usage from the same spot is a nice touch too.
This solves a surprisingly real coding-agent problem :) I've definitely started long Codex runs, walked away, then returned much later only to find the session finished quickly or had been waiting on one tiny approval the whole time. Keeping the Mac awake, sending remote notifications, and showing plan usage from the menu bar feels like exactly the lightweight companion these tools need, without becoming another agent platform. Curious how reliably BlackFlare detects when an agent is genuinely stuck versus simply thinking or running a long command.
The problem this solves is real — I have lost track of how many times I gave Claude Code a task, wandered off, and came back to find it had finished twenty minutes ago and was just sitting there. The notification routing to Telegram is the part I would actually use most. The thing I want to know upfront is how it distinguishes a session that is truly finished from one that is paused mid-task waiting on input — whether that is coming from parsing terminal output or from the agent explicitly reporting a terminal state, since those two behave very differently when something goes sideways halfway through.
About BlackFlare on Product Hunt
“Mission control for Claude Code & Codex in your menu bar”
BlackFlare launched on Product Hunt on July 29th, 2026 and earned 108 upvotes and 19 comments, placing #14 on the daily leaderboard. BlackFlare - a native macOS menu bar app for Claude Code and Codex. Keep your Mac awake during long runs, get notified when a session finishes or needs you, switch your defaults from the menu, and watch plan usage — all on-device.
BlackFlare was featured in Productivity (657.9k followers), Developer Tools (517.2k followers) and Menu Bar Apps (12.2k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 233.1k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted BlackFlare?
BlackFlare was hunted by The Black Flagger. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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