Close the lid. Claude Code and Codex keep going.

MacBooks have one rule that every long agent run eventually collides with: close the lid and the machine sleeps. It doesn’t matter that Claude is halfway through a refactor or Codex is twenty minutes into a migration — clamshell wins, the run stalls, and you come back to a session frozen mid-thought.

The workarounds are all bad. Leave the lid open with the machine burning on a shelf. Plug in an external display you don’t otherwise need. Or discover that caffeinate — the classic keep-awake hack — doesn’t survive a shut lid at all without one.

BlackFlare 1.1 removes the collision.

Keep working while the lid is closed

It’s a new opt-in option under Keep Mac Awake. Turn it on, approve the helper once in System Settings, and that’s the whole setup. From then on, while a Claude or Codex session is running, your Mac keeps working after you close the lid — no external display required. Toss the MacBook in a bag, walk to the kitchen, go to bed. The run finishes without you.

You stay in charge of when it applies:

• Plugged in, on battery, or both — both are on by default.
• A battery floor you set (15% out of the box) — on battery, BlackFlare pauses the lid-closed hold and notifies you before the charge runs low, instead of quietly draining the machine to zero.

And it never overstays. The moment your sessions finish, normal sleep is restored automatically — on every exit path, including a crash or a forced shutdown. There is no state where BlackFlare keeps holding your Mac awake after the work is done.

Pair it with Telegram or Slack notifications and the loop closes completely: lid shut, Mac working, phone pings you when the task finishes or needs an answer.

The full details — setup, power-source controls, and exactly what the helper does — are in the Keep Mac Awake doc.

Also in 1.1

• “Codex is waiting for you” notifications — when Codex pauses mid-task to ask a question, BlackFlare now sends a distinct waiting alert (desktop and Telegram/Slack) instead of staying silent until the end, matching what Claude sessions already did.
• An awake beacon in the menu — while sessions are holding sleep off, a small green coffee cup joins the chips at the top of the menu. One glance confirms it; it disappears the moment normal sleep is restored.
• Keep Mac Awake starts on for licensed users — first run with an active license switches it on, so long sessions are protected without a trip to Settings. Your own choice always wins once you touch the toggle.
• “Only send to Telegram/Slack when away” now defaults on — at the desk the desktop banner already has you covered, so remote pings arrive only when you’re actually away.
• Two fixes: a Codex session paused on a question no longer keeps the Mac awake, and the background token-refresh probe no longer fires phantom “finished a task” notifications.

The complete list is in the changelog.

Get it

BlackFlare is a free download for macOS 13+, Apple silicon and Intel. Keep Mac Awake — lid-closed option included — is part of the one-time $8 license.