Coucou lets your coding agents live in the Mac's notch, where a blob named Mochi asks for your OK
Coucou is a free, open-source Mac app that puts Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents in the notch, with Allow, Deny and Always one click away.
The notch on a MacBook is mostly dead space. Louis Raillé, a creative developer in France, moved a roommate in. Its name is Mochi, “a soft little squircle with big eyes that pops out of your notch,” according to the Coucou README, and its whole job is telling you when your coding agent needs you.
Mochi hides when nothing is running and peeks out when you hover. While an agent works, the notch shows what each session reads, edits and runs, step by step, with every changed file and its +N −M line counts (tap one to read the diff). When Claude Code asks for permission, the card offers Allow, Deny and Always right there. Codex gets Allow and Deny. Claude’s multiple-choice questions show up in the notch too, and a finished session gets “a happy little jump.”
Poke Mochi and it gets annoyed. Click it three times fast and it’s dizzy for a few seconds. Raillé drew all of it in SwiftUI with “No Rive, no Lottie, no images,” plus 28 handmade sounds, and the Mac app has zero third-party dependencies.
A tiny hook script forwards each Claude Code event over a Unix socket to the app, waits for your click, then answers the hook. Before it touches anything, Coucou backs up ~/.claude/settings.json, merges its hooks and shows you the diff. And if the app isn’t running, the hook exits immediately: in the README’s words, “Claude Code is never blocked.”
Lock the Mac and Mochi leaves. While an agent works, it moves to your iPhone’s Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, where you can Allow or Deny without opening the app, and every Allow takes Face ID. The README says your Mac “only applies a decision meant for the exact request it is waiting on.” The sync rides your own iCloud, with project names, commands and questions encrypted with your iCloud keys. On Windows and Linux there’s no notch, so the island slides down from the top edge instead, and Rhytam Biswas built an Android app that approves with your fingerprint.
The first release went up on September 27. By October 22 there had been 20 Mac versions, and the project had passed 6,000 stars on GitHub. Raillé’s origin story fits in one line of the README: “Some studios showed off gorgeous notch companions… and never let anyone use them.” So he built the open one, with Claude Code, the README says.
The list of agents it watches keeps growing: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, Copilot CLI, OpenCode, Amp and more, with a --agent flag for anything else.
Permission prompts are headed for wherever your eyes already are, and the terminal isn’t that place. Expect the agent-in-the-menu-bar idea to spread to watches, cars and whatever else has a lock screen, with the same fight every time over how much of the command fits on a small display.
Coucou’s next stop is the Mac App Store. Apple’s sandbox means that build drops Claude plan usage, the Apple Music pill and attaching the front window to the chat. Which version of Mochi do you install?