Background Agent Pings

If you're spinning up background agents in Claude, stop polling for their output. The system already pushes reminders when agents make progress or write files, so there's no need to waste tokens on repeated checks or flood your context with TaskOutput calls. Launch your agent with a specified output path, move on to other work, and wait for the system notification. Then read the output file directly. The pattern is simple: trust the built-in progress notifications instead of burning cycles on sleep loops and tail commands that accomplish nothing.

skills.sh installs: 502
GitHub stars: 3.9K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add parcadei/continuous-claude-v3 --skill background-agent-pings --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Background Agent Pings

Trust system reminders as agent progress notifications. Don't poll.

Pattern

When you launch a background agent, continue working on other tasks. The system will notify you via reminders when:

Agent makes progress: Agent <id> progress: X new tools used, Y new tokens
Agent writes output file (check the path you specified)

DO

1. Task(run_in_background=true, prompt="... Output to: .claude/cache/agents/<type>/output.md")
2. Continue with next task immediately
3. When system reminder shows agent activity, check if output file exists
4. Read output file only when agent signals completion

DON'T

# BAD: Polling wastes tokens and time
Task(run_in_background=true)
Bash("sleep 5 && ls ...")  # polling
Bash("tail /tmp/claude/.../tasks/<id>.output")  # polling
TaskOutput(task_id="...")  # floods context