Coucou

What it is

Coucou is a free app that puts a small animated character, called Mochi, in the notch at the top of your MacBook screen. It watches your AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and about ten others) and tells you when one has finished or needs you.

The main job is permission requests. When Claude Code stops to ask "can I run this command?", the request pops up in the notch with Allow, Deny and Always buttons. You click once and carry on with what you were doing. You don't have to hunt for the right terminal window.

It's MIT-licensed and built by Louis Raillé, who says he built it with Claude Code. The first version came out on 27 September 2026, so it's about four weeks old. There are also Windows and Linux versions, an iPhone beta and an Android app.

What actually happens when you use it

1. You install it and connect your agents. In settings you click "Install hooks". A hook is a small script your agent runs at certain moments, like before it uses a tool. Coucou backs up your Claude Code settings file, adds its hooks and shows you the change before saving.
2. Mochi hides until something happens. When an agent is working, you can see what it's reading, editing and running. File edits show a live count of lines added and removed, and you can open the full change.
3. Requests come to you. Permission requests and the agent's multiple-choice questions appear in the notch. You can answer there or click "Reply in terminal" to do it the normal way.
4. It follows you to your phone. Lock your Mac and the iPhone app shows the agent's status on your Lock Screen, where you can approve with Face ID. The Android app does the same over your home Wi-Fi.
5. If Coucou isn't running, nothing breaks. The README says the hook exits straight away, so Claude Code never gets stuck waiting.

The app has grown well beyond that core job. It now also does voice dictation, records and summarises calls, chats with several AI models, shows Spotify and Apple Music, tracks crypto balances, shows Stripe and GitHub stats, and (experimentally) shows your WhatsApp messages.

What people like

There's very little first-hand feedback yet. We found no Hacker News discussion and no real review. The Reddit launch posts were removed by moderators before anyone commented. So treat this section as thin.

• The core idea answers a real problem. Approving agent requests from wherever you are is the pitch that got it noticed, including a launch write-up on AlphaSignal. Users of another agent tool posted on Reddit wishing it worked for their setup too, and one replied that they'd definitely try it.
• Contributors are invested. Users aren't just reporting bugs, they're fixing them. One Windows user tested four pending fixes together and confirmed they solved the worst problems. Another built a queue for parallel permission requests in their own copy and offered it back.
• It's careful with your settings. It backs up config files and shows you the changes before writing them. It keeps API keys in your system's password store and, according to the README, sends no usage data anywhere.

What people run into

• Fixes pile up waiting for review. At the time of writing there were 346 open pull requests against 238 merged ones. A helper on the Windows tracker explained that Windows fixes take longer to review because most of the work goes to the Mac.
• Windows is rough. The island can hide and never come back on hover, an issue open since the first week. The dictation pill can sit mid-screen and block clicks. Several users say together these make it close to unusable on Windows, and a user on the latest release says it's still happening.
• Linux can freeze or eat CPU. One report traced repeated freezes to an audio stream that stays open with sound turned off. Another found a release kept a background process near 100% CPU.
• Uninstalling can leave a mess. On Windows, removing Coucou left its hooks in place, so Antigravity started refusing tool calls until the user cleaned it up by hand. A related report says the uninstaller leaves hooks pointing at a missing file. Another says reinstalling hooks can delete your own hooks if their path contains "coucou".
• Several sessions at once is fragile. On the Mac, answering one session's question can hide another session's pending approval. On Windows, a second request while one is showing is handed back to the terminal, where nobody's looking.
• The extras bring their own problems. The experimental WhatsApp feature showed one user a conversation that didn't exist, and they logged the app out of WhatsApp as a precaution.

Before you install

• The Mac is the place to try it. Most work and most fixes go there first. On Windows and Linux, expect bugs that may block normal use.
• Remove the hooks before you uninstall. Use the app's own uninstall option for hooks first, then delete the app. If an agent starts refusing tool calls afterwards, check its settings file for leftover Coucou entries.
• Be careful approving from your phone. It's handy, but you're approving commands you can't read in full. The Android app already refuses to approve very long commands from the phone for that reason.
• Switch off what you don't need. Chat, voice commands and call summaries use your own AI keys, so they cost you money. The WhatsApp feature runs through an unofficial gateway, and the README warns that WhatsApp may restrict accounts that misuse automation.
• Privacy looks sensible. There's no account and no telemetry. iPhone sync runs through your own iCloud. A small relay server sends lock-screen updates and, per the README, only sees the agent's name and state.
• The Windows installer isn't signed yet, so Windows will warn you about an unknown publisher the first time.
• Only the code is MIT. The name, Mochi, the icon and the sounds belong to the author, so a fork needs its own name and character.

The short version

Coucou does one useful thing: it stops your agents sitting idle while they wait for a click you didn't notice. Around that it has piled on dictation, music, crypto and WhatsApp in under a month, faster than the bugs are being fixed. On a Mac, it's a fun, low-risk experiment if you remove the hooks properly when you're done. On Windows and Linux, or if you just want something stable, give it a few weeks to settle.