Cursor Notification When Done: Every Way to Get Notified When Cursor Finishes

Cursor's agent is fast, but it is not instant — and the minutes it spends working are exactly long enough to lose you. You switch to Slack or a code review, the agent finishes (or stops to ask a question), and nobody tells you. Ten minutes later you tab back to an answer that has been sitting there cold. Multiply that by every agent run in a day and the silence becomes the most expensive part of the workflow.

The fix is a notification when Cursor is done. There are more ways to get one than most people realize — from a checkbox that already exists in your settings to a push notification on your phone. Here's the full menu, easiest first.

1. The built-in completion sound

Cursor ships a completion sound — it is just off by default. Open Cursor's settings (the gear icon, or Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + J), look under the Chat section, and enable the completion sound toggle. From then on, Cursor plays an audible ding whenever the agent finishes responding.

For most people this is the right first step: zero setup, works today. Its limits show up quickly though. A sound only helps if you are at the machine with the volume up, it does not tell you which project finished if you run several windows, and it vanishes into the void if you stepped away for coffee.

2. System notifications

Depending on your version, Cursor can also raise an operating-system notification when the agent completes or wants your attention. Search the settings for "notification" and enable what is offered. A desktop banner survives you being in another app — which is precisely where you were going anyway — and on macOS it lands in Notification Center, so there is a paper trail if you missed the moment itself.

Two caveats. First, banners are easy to dismiss reflexively and impossible to hear from another room. Second, if you have Do Not Disturb or a Focus mode on while coding (many of us do), the banner is suppressed exactly when you need it.

3. Terminal-side tricks for Cursor's agent terminal

When the work you are waiting on is a long command the agent runs in the terminal — a test suite, a build — you can make the command itself announce completion. Appending ; afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff on macOS (or ; paplay a sound file on Linux) gives you a ding the moment the command exits, regardless of what Cursor does afterwards. It is crude, but it is scriptable and per-task.

4. Push notifications on your phone

The methods above all assume you are near the machine. The moment you want to walk away — lunch, a meeting, the school run — you need the notification to follow you. The common DIY route is a small script that fires a push through a service like ntfy when the agent completes, wired up through whatever hook or wrapper your setup allows. It works, but it is plumbing you have to build and maintain per machine.

5. The zero-config option

This is the gap AI Done Now was built to close. It is a native app that watches your AI coding tools — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex CLI and friends — and notifies you the moment an agent finishes or is waiting on your input. No hooks to write, no scripts to maintain: install it, and every agent on your machine gets done-ness detection with desktop and phone notifications out of the box. The details are on the Cursor agent notifications page.

Which setup should you actually use?

• You mostly stay at your desk: the built-in completion sound plus system notifications covers you in thirty seconds of settings work.
• You run multiple projects or windows: you need per-source notifications that say which agent finished — native banners or a watcher app, not a single anonymous ding.
• You leave the machine while agents run: phone push is the only thing that actually works, via your own ntfy plumbing or an app that ships it.
• The agent keeps stopping to ask questions: make sure whatever you pick fires on waiting for input, not just on completion — the stuck-at-a-prompt case wastes more time than the finished case.

The theme across all five options is the same one we keep coming back to on this blog (see the case against watching the terminal and the Codex CLI notifications guide): agents are only a productivity win if you can safely stop watching them. A notification when Cursor is done is not a nice-to-have — it is the feature that turns waiting time back into working time.