caffeinate-style apps stop the moment the lid shuts, and Apple's own closed-lid mode needs power and a monitor. awake needs neither.
brew install --cask adriangalilea/tap/awakeRight-click the cup, press ⌃⌥⌘A from anywhere, or type awake (awake 2h, awake --until 23:30). It is one switch, and it only ever flips your own session, never anyone else's. Your coding agents use the same awake, for exactly as long as their work runs. Left-click shows who is keeping the Mac awake, and asleep ends it. No accessibility permission to grant; remap the shortcut with awake hotkey.
Lid shut in a bag and it gets too hot: awake gives up the lid, even if you forced it, and the Mac sleeps before it cooks. A battery floor, 15% by default, does the same before the battery drains, and Low Power Mode ends the session unless you forced it. Everything resets on reboot, so a forgotten session cannot outlive a restart. And if you flip the flag by hand with pmset, awake adopts it as a session rather than silently undoing you.
awake comes with a skill that teaches Claude Code and Codex to use it: awake skill install. A build or a coding agent holds the Mac awake for exactly as long as it runs (awake -w <pid>), and may ask to keep going with the lid shut. Only you can say yes: a question mark rises off the cup, one click grants it, and the grant ends with the work. The cup always says what closing the lid will do: outline, it sleeps; filled, it sleeps when the lid closes; burning, it keeps running. awake status --json is the scripting surface.
Keeping a closed Mac awake needs root, so awake grant asks once, through the macOS password sheet, and installs a rule that allows exactly two commands, pmset -a disablesleep 0 and pmset -a disablesleep 1, for your user only. It is checked with visudo before it lands. awake grant --remove takes it back.
Critical heat, a low battery and Low Power Mode end a session while the lid is shut, where no notification reaches you. Point awake notify at any program (a push service, an SMS gateway, a script that calls a webhook) and it gets the message before the Mac sleeps, while the network is still up.
No requests yet. Propose the first one.
awake skill install links it into Claude Code and Codex, whichever of the two is on your Mac. It teaches the agent to hold the Mac awake for exactly as long as its work runs, to ask you before it keeps going with the lid shut, and never to reach for caffeinate, which dies when the lid closes. The link points into the app, so upgrading awake upgrades the skill. awake skill shows where it is installed, awake skill remove takes it away, and deleting the app removes it too.awake hotkey changed the global toggle, the menu item it would hit still showed ⌃⌥⌘A. It now shows the shortcut you set.awake status, the rest of the CLI's output and the menu bar tooltip separate their parts with · or a comma where they used a dash: ☕ awake · you · indefinite.awake hotkey no longer hangs after a reinstall. Remapping the global shortcut restarts awake to apply it, and when the background item left by a previous install was stuck, that restart waited forever. It now uses the same restart as everything else, which replaces a stuck item and starts.awake command after a reinstall could wait forever on the leftover background item from the previous install. It now replaces it and starts.awake command. Installing with Homebrew no longer runs anything behind your back, and no longer prints deprecation warnings on every brew command.brew upgrade, awake notices the new version within a minute and restarts into it, keeping every claim.awake status says the same, and the row clears as soon as notifications are back on. Never answered the prompt? The row offers to ask.awake notify hook if you set one, since a banner behind a closed lid informs nobody. The menu and awake status say "critical heat" while it lasts.thermal to its --on-end hook, and status --json gains thermalCritical.awake) still carry it. A named claim — any program: a cron job, a build, a coding agent — keeps the Mac awake lid-open only, and may *ask* with --lid. The cup grows a "?", the menu leads with the ask, and one click answers it: the grant lasts exactly as long as the work it was granted for, then closing the lid sleeps the Mac again. awake allow and awake deny are the same answer from the shell; deny after a grant revokes it. Until now every programmatic claim silently armed lid-closed survival — six agents working meant a Mac that would run hot in a bag, and nothing on screen said so.awake suspend) is still that machine-level switch, as the explicit act it always really was. Each roster row now opens into its own controls: allow, dismiss or revoke a lid ask, end one stuck session or all of an owner's.awake check <pid|label> answers "is my wish honored right now" with an honest exit code (0 in effect · 2 kept but suspended · 3 gone), and --on-end CMD runs a command of the caller's choosing when its claim ends, whatever the reason, with the reason as $1.awake -w PID and --label claims no longer arm the lid flag; a job that must survive the lid closing adds --lid and the human grants it. Everything else is unchanged: same commands, same JSON (status --json gains lidArmed, askPending, and per-claim wantsLid/lidGranted/onEnd).brew upgrade --cask awake; awake status shows the same nudge. The fetch carries nothing: no identifier, no usage data. It doubles as the only signal the garden has of how many Macs run awake (a salted, non-reversible hash of the day's caller IP, never the IP). awake updates off stops both.asleep, or "End all claims" in the menu.awake suspend / awake resume: the toggle from the shell.you · indefinite, claude · while 2 processes run, release build · 42m left. Process watches name themselves after the process; --label names anything else; pids stay in tooltips and the CLI. No more decoding a process table in your menu bar.awake off WHO ends just the claims matching an owner name or pid; bare asleep / awake off remains the end-everything gesture.awake --label NAME names a claim so the menu and notifications can say who wanted the Mac awake.awake display on|off sets the standing "keep the screen on" preference from the shell, which until now existed only as a checkbox in the menu. It applies to every way a session starts (menu, right-click, hotkey, CLI) and takes effect immediately: flip it during a running session and the display assertion is added or dropped there and then, no re-engaging. awake display on its own reports the current setting.awake --display remains the one-shot form for a single session.awake notify <path> points the out-of-band alert at any executable you like, called with the message as its only argument. The battery floor and Low Power Mode both end sessions while the lid is shut, where a screen notification reaches nobody. Nothing is shipped for it and nothing is assumed: a push service, an SMS gateway, a script that curls a webhook. awake notify alone shows it, --clear removes it. The call is made before the kernel flag drops, so the request leaves while the network is still up.awake status --json, which omits the session key entirely when nothing is running.⌃⌥⌘A does the same from anywhere. Remap it with awake hotkey.awake 2h, awake --until 23:30, asleep to stop, and awake status --json for scripts.awake -w <pid> stays awake exactly as long as a process lives, matched on start time so a recycled pid can never keep a dead job's session alive.awake grant --remove takes it back.No requests yet. Propose the first one.
