cookbook / trust, but verify

X-ray your agent's file edits

You tell an agent "refactor the auth module" and it goes quiet for two minutes. It's a black box: you have no idea which files it's touching, and you just have to trust it isn't rewriting the wrong directory. This puts a live, silent ticker of every file it changes right in your peripheral vision. Give the command, go back to reading, and watch the notch quietly flash Created, Modified, Deleted as it works. If you see it touch something it shouldn't, you know to jump in. (Storm, an agent, invented this one too.)

Why this one is different

Every other recipe asks the agent to narrate itself. This one watches the filesystem, so it's completely agent-agnostic: it works with Claude Code, Cursor, OpenClaw, a teammate, or a plain shell script, none of which need to know Tellie exists. It turns the terrifying "black box" of autonomous coding into a reassuring, ambient heartbeat. We use tellie flash (a transient pulse that auto-clears after a few seconds), so the changes tick past instead of piling up in the roster.

1. The flash handler

Save this as tellie-xray-flash.sh and chmod +x it. It maps a file event to a labeled, icon'd flash. Needs Tellie + the tellie CLI (npm i -g @tellie/cli).

#!/bin/bash
# tellie-xray-flash.sh <event> <path>  flash one file change to the notch.
case "$1" in
  add)              icon=sparkles; verb=Created  ;;
  unlink)           icon=trash;    verb=Deleted  ;;
  addDir|unlinkDir) exit 0 ;;                 # skip bare directory events
  *)                icon=pencil;   verb=Modified ;;
esac
tellie flash "$verb: $(basename "$2")" --source "File watch" --icon "$icon"

2. Point a watcher at your project

From your project root, watch everything except the noise. You already have node, so chokidar-cli runs with zero install and emits clean add / change / unlink events:

chmod +x tellie-xray-flash.sh

npx -y chokidar-cli "**/*" \
  --ignore "**/{.git,node_modules,dist,build,.next,coverage}/**" \
  --command "$PWD/tellie-xray-flash.sh {event} {path}"

Now point any agent at the repo and watch your notch. The --ignore line is the whole game: skip it and one npm install or build will flood your notch with thousands of flashes. If a fast refactor feels too busy, add --throttle 300 (chokidar coalesces bursts).

Prefer no node dep? Use fswatch

If you'd rather stay Mac-native, fswatch (brew install fswatch) does the same, recursively, with no node watcher:

fswatch -x -e "/\.git/" -e "node_modules" -e "/(dist|build)/" . | while read -r path flags; do
  case "$flags" in
    *Created*) icon=sparkles; verb=Created  ;;
    *Removed*) icon=trash;    verb=Deleted  ;;
    *)         icon=pencil;   verb=Modified ;;
  esac
  tellie flash "$verb: $(basename "$path")" --source "File watch" --icon "$icon"
done

Good to know

• Agent-agnostic is the superpower. It watches files, not the agent, so it reports on any tool, even ones that have never heard of Tellie. That's real oversight, not self-reported.
• The ignore list is mandatory. Without it, builds and installs bury the signal. Tune it to your stack (add target, .venv, vendor, etc.).
• Bursts are a feature. flash auto-clears, so a flurry of edits reads as a heartbeat, not clutter. Throttle only if you want to.
• It's free. Just the flash verb and a standard file watcher, no Pro required.