Notifications
The notification bell sits in the app rail footer, directly above your account, and opens your durable inbox from any screen.
What lands in the inbox
- Task outcomes — completion, failure, policy block, missed work, and approval-required events, for tasks you own.
- Unattended agent approvals — a direct link to the exact pending tool request when you leave the chat before deciding.
- Completed root agent turns — so a long-running chat answer finds you even if you navigated away.
- Completed unattended Prompt runs, including multi-step Prompts.
A multi-step Prompt emits one item after the whole run completes. Internal steps, tools, delegated agents, and sub-agents never emit their own items — a five-step chain produces one notification, not five.
Kaizen applies one attendance rule across notification producers. If the exact chat or streamed prompt run is open and visible, completion is already visible there and no inbox item is inserted. Work that continues after you leave is unattended and can notify normally. A chat left open in a browser tab you have switched away from, or in a minimized window, stops counting as watched after about ten seconds out of sight, so its completion reaches the inbox; coming back to that chat marks the item read without a toast. Scheduled tasks remain background work and follow the notification categories selected on their definition.
A repeating task tells you about an outcome once, not once per occurrence. A task that runs every two seconds for a hundred occurrences leaves one completion item, not a hundred. A different outcome is a different item, so the first failure after a run of successes still reaches you, and a run that is waiting for your approval or your input always gets its own item because you have to act on that exact run. Changing the schedule starts the count again: the next outcome after a reschedule notifies.
Approval prompts follow the same rule. An active chat displays the prompt without adding inbox noise. If no presence lease shows that you are watching, Kaizen records a durable approval notification. A presence-store failure errs toward delivery so an unattended approval is not silently lost.
Toasts versus the inbox
Notifications live inside Kaizen. They are not a desktop or phone alert, and
Kaizen never asks your browser for notification permission. While a Kaizen tab
is in the background, its title shows the unread count, such as (2) Kaizen,
so you can spot an arrival from the tab strip.
New unread items discovered by the background poll briefly appear as a bottom-right toast. Opening the app does not replay old items as toasts; the inbox is the durable record, the toast is a courtesy.
Reading and clearing
Each producer supplies a typed destination rather than an arbitrary URL. An item therefore returns to its original chat, the exact prompt in Prompt Builder Flow, its task, or its exact run trace. Mark one item read, or mark all read. The inbox closes when you navigate to another view, so it never covers the controls on the destination you just opened.
The visible-route check uses resource identity as well as the section path. Watching one task or prompt does not silently acknowledge a notification from another one.
Read state is a display concern. Marking something read never deletes execution evidence — the run, its trace, and its audit records are unaffected.
What a notification will not tell you
Notification titles and reasons are bounded safe summaries. They never contain:
- task input text or model output,
- secrets, credentials, or tokens,
- raw provider errors,
- hidden reasoning.
If you need the detail, open the run trace from the item. Opening it re-authorizes the run and its referenced sources at read time.
Preferences
Notification preferences are evaluated when a material state actually changes. Disabling a category suppresses future inserts — it does not retroactively remove items already recorded, and it does not stop the underlying work.
Retention
Notification retention is separate from task deletion. Deleting a task stops future scheduling; it does not immediately erase the notifications, runs, traces, or audit records that already exist. Those follow your deployment's retention policy — ask an administrator for the window.