afknavs/glimt

**Cue lights for AI agents.** When your coding agent finishes, gets stuck or fails, your
room tells you: a lamp pulses green, the LED strip holds amber, a tone plays. Then your
lights go back to exactly how they were.
It runs on the computer you already keep on: no hub, no spare machine, about 100 MB of
memory. Your agents can control the room too ("turn on the bay window light" from ChatGPT
on your phone), and the same devices show up in Apple Home.
*Glimt* is Norwegian for a flash of light caught in the corner of your eye.
Why
Agents now work for minutes at a time, so you look away. Then you lose ten minutes
because the agent finished, or stopped to ask a question, and the notification was
buried under forty others.
A light in the corner of your eye does not get buried. Theatres have long used *cue lights*
for exactly this: a silent signal to someone whose eyes are busy elsewhere.
Asking a chatbot to turn on the lamp works here too, and it makes a good demo, but the
switch on the wall is faster. The useful direction is the reverse: the agent gets *your*
attention, through the room instead of through another screen.
The five cues
| Cue | Looks like | Use it when |
| --- | --- | --- |
| done | two green pulses, soft tone, lights restore | a long task finished |
| attention | amber, and it **stays** amber until you deal with it | the agent is blocked on you |
| error | three sharp red flashes | something failed |
| info | one blue pulse, silent | worth knowing, not worth a sound |
| working | dim indigo glow until cleared | a long job is running |
Add your own in three lines of config, or pass a colour and a pattern:
glimt signal --color pink --pattern breathe -m "PR approved".
Every cue snapshots the lights it borrows and restores them afterwards, so a cue never
leaves your room in a different state than it found it. More on cues
Try it in a minute, without any hardware
Requires Python 3.11+. It runs on macOS every day; it is written for Linux and a
Raspberry Pi too, where it is so far untested. Where to run it
Or let your agent set it up
Paste this into Claude Code, Codex or any agent that can run commands on your computer:
> Set up Glimt for me from https://github.com/afknavs/glimt. Follow the "set it up for
> someone" section of its AGENTS.md. I have: *(say what you own, e.g. Smart Life bulbs
> and a Bluetooth LED strip)*.
It installs Glimt, shows you the demo, and stops where a person is needed: scanning a QR
code in your smart-home app, or pressing the button on a Hue bridge.
Then connect your real lights
That one command also offers to start Glimt at login, connect Claude Code and Codex,
and add the menu bar app. Each is a yes or no, and each has its own command if you would
rather do it later:
| Works with | How | Status |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Tuya / Smart Life** bulbs, plugs, strips, air conditioners | local network first, cloud only when a device cannot do LAN | used daily on real hardware |
| **Bluetooth LED strips** (ELK-BLEDOM, MELK, "Lotus Lamp" strips) | one persistent BLE connection | used daily on real hardware |
| **Home Assistant** | anything it already controls, over one WebSocket | tested against a simulated server; hardware reports welcome |
| **Philips Hue** | bridge API v2 with pushed state | tested against a simulated bridge; hardware reports welcome |
| **WLED** | local JSON API | tested against a simulated strip; hardware reports welcome |
| **This computer's speaker** | a tone or a spoken sentence with each cue | macOS and Linux |
**Yours is not on the list?** Bridges are one Python file, and the contract is written
so an agent can do it for you. Paste this into your coding agent:
> Read docs/bridges.md in the glimt repo and write a bridge for my * *.