Stop watching the terminal — let it text you
I don’t want to sit and watch an agent work. It runs for twenty minutes, I check on it eleven times, and ten of those were pointless. Meanwhile the phone that would happily tell me the answer is in my pocket all day, doing nothing.
So I looked into it, half expecting to lose an evening. It’s a chat with a bot, and then one line. You message Telegram’s setup bot, it hands you a key, and from then on your machine can write to you like a person would. Nothing to install, nothing to host.
Setup is the easy part. What belongs in the message is the real decision. A bot chat is a normal Telegram chat, so it isn’t end-to-end encrypted — those messages are exactly as private as Telegram itself. Mine only ever sends a nudge: build green, job done, disk almost full. No names, no numbers, no content. It’s a doorbell, not a letter.
When I want the detail, it goes somewhere that asks who I am first. The ping says look now, and the actual report waits behind a login — a far better read than a phone notification anyway.
Two things to know before you build one. The bot can’t message you until you’ve messaged it once — that’s how it learns where you are. And it carries about one message per second, per chat: plenty for notifications, useless as a log.
The whole thing, in code
# 1. chat with @BotFather in Telegram → /newbot → it hands you a token
# 2. send your new bot any message from your phone (it can't talk first)
# 3. ask who "you" are:
curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOKEN/getUpdates" \
| jq '.result[0].message.chat.id'
# 4. that's the entire notification:
curl -s "https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOKEN/sendMessage" \
-d chat_id="$CHAT_ID" -d text="build green"One caveat if the machine isn’t only yours: the token and the message text sit in
curl’s arguments, where anyone who can run ps will see them. curl -K - reads
the URL from stdin instead and keeps both out of the process list.
No app, no server, nothing to host.
Follow-up resources
- Bots: an introduction for developers — including the “a bot can’t start the conversation” rule
- Bot FAQ — broadcasting limits — the per-chat, per-group and bulk numbers