Setting Up Quiet Hours for AI Agent Notifications

A developer running three agent sessions per day might receive 15-20 notifications: session starts, permission requests, budget warnings, completions, and errors. During work hours, these are useful signals. At 11 PM, they are interruptions. The solution is not to disable notifications entirely. It is to suppress routine ones during defined hours while keeping critical alerts active.

Configuring Quiet Hours

# Set quiet hours from 10 PM to 7 AM
styrby config quiet-hours set --start 22:00 --end 07:00

# Set timezone (important for consistency)
styrby config quiet-hours timezone America/New_York

# View current settings
styrby config quiet-hours show
# Quiet hours: 22:00 - 07:00 (America/New_York)
# Critical bypass: enabled
# Suppressed: session-start, session-complete, low-risk approvals
# Active during quiet: budget-stop, high-risk permissions, errors

What Gets Suppressed

During quiet hours, these notifications are silently logged but not pushed to your device:

Session start and completion
Low-risk auto-approved permissions
Budget notify alerts (informational only)
Session bookmark confirmations

These notifications still appear in the app when you open it. They just do not wake your phone.

Critical Alert Bypass

Some notifications should always get through, regardless of quiet hours:

Budget hard stops. When a session hits its spending limit and pauses, you need to know. The session is blocked until you respond.
High-risk permission requests. Red-classified permissions (file deletion, network requests, system changes) bypass quiet hours because the agent is waiting for a response.
Repeated errors. Three or more errors in a row triggers a critical notification. This usually means the agent is stuck and spending tokens unproductively.

You can customize which alerts bypass quiet hours:

# Add budget-slowdown to critical bypass
styrby config quiet-hours bypass add budget-slowdown

# Remove session errors from bypass (you'll review in the morning)
styrby config quiet-hours bypass remove session-error

# View bypass list
styrby config quiet-hours bypass list

Per-Agent Notification Settings

Not all agents need the same notification level. You might want full notifications for a Claude Opus session doing critical architecture work, but only errors from a Gemini CLI research session.

# Claude: all notifications
styrby config notifications --agent claude --level all

# Codex: only errors and permission requests
styrby config notifications --agent codex --level important

# Gemini: errors only
styrby config notifications --agent gemini --level errors-only

# Aider: silent (check manually)
styrby config notifications --agent aider --level silent

Weekend Configuration

Some developers run agents on weekends for personal projects but do not want the same notification intensity as weekdays. Styrby supports separate quiet hours for weekdays and weekends:

# Weekday quiet hours: 10 PM to 7 AM
styrby config quiet-hours set --days weekday --start 22:00 --end 07:00

# Weekend quiet hours: all day except noon to 2 PM
styrby config quiet-hours set --days weekend --start 00:00 --end 12:00
styrby config quiet-hours set --days weekend --start 14:00 --end 23:59

Reviewing Suppressed Notifications

When you open the app after quiet hours end, suppressed notifications appear in a summary view:

Number of notifications suppressed
Breakdown by type (permission, budget, session, error)
Any sessions that completed overnight
Total cost accrued during quiet hours

This morning summary gives you a quick overview without scrolling through individual notifications. Tap any category to see the full list.

Finding the Right Balance

Start with the defaults: suppress routine notifications during sleep hours, let critical alerts through. After a week, review what woke you up and what you wish had. Adjust the bypass list accordingly.

The goal is not zero notifications. The goal is that every notification during quiet hours requires your attention, and none of them could have waited until morning.