Approve What Your Headless Coding Agent Does With One Telegram Button
The problem with letting agents run unattended
I run several coding agents headless on my workstation. One reviews
pull requests, one implements tickets from a written plan, one watches
repositories and regenerates documentation when the code moves. They run
as claude -p processes started by systemd timers and shell
scripts, which means nobody is sitting at a terminal when they
finish.
Most of their work is safe to do alone: reading code, running tests, writing a report to disk. A few steps are not. Posting a review comment under my name, pushing a branch, opening a PR, deploying to a shared environment. Those are outward facing and hard to take back, and I want to see them before they happen.
The usual answers did not fit. A permission prompt needs a terminal. Email is too slow to act on. A web dashboard is one more thing to keep running. What I already had open all day was Telegram on my phone, and Telegram bots support inline buttons. So every risky step became a message with Approve, Show and Skip under it.