Introduction

When I hand a long-running job to Claude Code, I can't tell what's happening unless I'm watching the screen. So I built a skill that has the Echo Dot beside me read out "I'm about to do this" and "done" in Japanese. It looks simple, but the implementation hits a string of small traps: the HA SSH add-on's sshd constraints, the Amazon-side _speak APIs going silent, and /tmp being a tmpfs that wipes the script. Here's the configuration I landed on after stepping on all of them.

For what it's worth, this very post had its in-progress status ("writing the Japanese version," "verifying," "merging") read aloud from my study's Echo Dot by exactly this mechanism, while I was writing it.

When I hand Claude Code a multi-step job (edit files → wait for CI → open a PR, etc.), I lose track of progress the moment I switch to something else.…