Unified Notifications Ops

Unified Notifications Ops

Use this skill when the real problem is not a missing ping. The real problem is a fragmented notification system.

The job is to turn scattered events into one operator surface with:

• clear severity
• clear ownership
• clear routing
• clear follow-up action

When to Use

• the user wants a unified notification lane across GitHub, Linear, local hooks, desktop alerts, chat, or email
• CI failures, review requests, issue updates, and operator events are arriving in disconnected places
• the current setup creates noise instead of action
• the user wants to consolidate overlapping notification branches or backlog proposals into one agent-native lane
• the workspace already has hooks, MCPs, or connected tools, but no coherent notification policy

Preferred Surface

Start from what already exists:

• GitHub issues, PRs, reviews, comments, and CI
• Linear issue/project movement
• local hook events and session lifecycle signals
• desktop notification primitives
• connected email/chat surfaces when they actually exist

Prefer agent-native orchestration over telling the user to adopt a separate notification product.

Non-Negotiable Rules

• never expose tokens, secrets, webhook secrets, or internal identifiers
• separate:
  • event source
  • severity
  • routing channel
  • operator action
• default to digest-first when interruption cost is unclear
• do not fan out every event to every channel
• if the real fix is better issue triage, hook policy, or project flow, say so explicitly

Event Pipeline

Treat the lane as:

1. Capture the event
2. Classify urgency and owner
3. Route to the correct channel
4. Collapse duplicates and low-signal churn
5. Attach the next operator action

The goal is fewer, better notifications.

Default Severity Model

If the workspace has no severity model, build one before proposing automation.

Workflow

1. Inventory the current surface

List:

• event sources
• current channels
• existing hooks/scripts that emit alerts
• duplicate paths for the same event
• silent failure cases where important things are not being surfaced

Call out what the agent stack already owns.

2. Decide what deserves interruption

For each event family, answer:

• who needs to know?
• how fast do they need to know?
• should this interrupt, batch, or just log?

Use these defaults:

• interrupt for release, CI, security, and owner-blocking events
• digest for medium-signal updates
• log-only for telemetry and low-signal lifecycle markers

3. Collapse duplicates before adding channels

Look for:

• the same PR event appearing in GitHub, Linear, and local logs
• repeated hook notifications for the same failure
• comments or status churn that should be summarized instead of forwarded raw
• channels that duplicate each other without adding a better action path

Prefer:

• one canonical summary
• one owner
• one primary channel
• one fallback path

4. Design the agent-native workflow

For each real notification need, define:

• source
• gate
• shape: immediate alert, digest, queue, or dashboard-only
• channel
• action

If the agent stack already has the primitive, prefer:

• a skill for operator triage
• a hook for automatic emission/enforcement
• an agent for delegated classification
• an MCP/connector only when a real bridge is missing

5. Return an action-biased design

End with:

• what to keep
• what to suppress
• what to merge
• what the agent should wrap next

Output Format

CURRENT SURFACE
- sources
- channels
- duplicates
- gaps

EVENT MODEL
- critical
- high
- medium
- low

ROUTING PLAN
- source -> channel
- why
- operator owner

CONSOLIDATION
- suppress
- merge
- canonical summaries

NEXT AGENT MOVE
- skill / hook / agent / MCP
- exact workflow to build next

Recommendation Rules

• prefer one strong lane over many weak ones
• prefer digests for medium and low-signal updates
• prefer hooks when the signal should emit automatically
• prefer operator skills when the work is triage, routing, and review-first decision-making
• prefer project-flow-ops when the root cause is backlog / PR coordination rather than alerts
• prefer workspace-surface-audit when the user first needs a source inventory
• if desktop notifications are enough, do not invent an unnecessary external bridge

Good Use Cases

• "We have GitHub, Linear, and local hook alerts, but no single operator flow"
• "Our CI failures are noisy and people ignore them"
• "I want one notification policy across Claude, OpenCode, and Codex surfaces"
• "Figure out what should interrupt versus land in a digest"
• "Collapse overlapping notification PR ideas into one canonical agent lane"

Related Skills

• workspace-surface-audit
• project-flow-ops
• github-ops
• knowledge-ops
• customer-billing-ops when the notification pain is billing/customer operations rather than engineering