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Solo development with AI

In solo development with AI you do the work as a trio: you, the AI assistant in the IDE and autonomous agents that iterate on things while you switch to another task. This mode has its own set of “blind spots”:

  • Long-running autonomous tasks — an agent spends half an hour dealing with a DB migration, and you don’t want to check the terminal every 30 seconds.
  • External dependencies — LLM APIs, vector DBs, embeddings service: their status changes without warning, and you don’t have an SRE team.
  • Cost — a lot of tokens get burned; it’s easy to lose control of the bill.
  • Model quality — a new model release can break your pipeline right in the middle of the night.
  • MCP tools — if your AI calls its MCP server, its outage looks like “the model is acting up”, not like an alert.

Notifly covers all of this in a few lines: heartbeats, active monitors, webhooks and custom cloud functions for synthetic checks send push to your device exactly when you need to intervene.

ScenarioWhat it covers
LLM API spendingExceeded token budget
LLM provider availabilityOpenAI/Anthropic/etc. not responding, 5xx, rate limits
Model latency degradationSudden “model has slowed down”
Long AI agent task completion”Agent finished refactoring — go review it”
Stuck agent / loopHeartbeat protection against silent hangs
Human-in-the-loop neededAgent paused a task — your approval is required
Vector DB / RAG infrastructureQdrant/Pinecone/Weaviate are down
Eval / model quality dropRegression after changing prompt or model
Safety / prompt injection triggeredSuspicious user input
MCP server healthOwn or third-party MCP stopped responding
Custom cloud function integrity checkServer-side “synthetic user” that sends an alert when something breaks

LLM incidents are often short and noisy: 10 minutes of 500s → fixed. Email alerts arrive in batches with delay and drown in email; a push notification to your phone via Notifly is instant, free, and easy to silently dismiss if you see the incident has already resolved itself.

All recipes in this section use the same basic stack:

  • POST /message — ad-hoc alerts from code;
  • Heartbeat — “agent is alive”;
  • Active monitors — external HTTP/TCP/TLS checks;
  • Webhooks — receipt of events from billing/CI;
  • Email Inbox — alerts from providers that don’t have webhooks;
  • custom cloud functions on YC — for your own checks.