When you’re deep in a problem, the last thing you want to think about is running the same chores repeatedly – check if the agent’s complete, lint your code, rebuild and run tests. While seemingly inconsequential, they compound into a constant tax on your focus.

That’s where Rovo Dev CLI’s new Event Hooks come in: they allow tooling to automatically take care of repetitive tasks, so you can stay focused on the work that actually matters.

What are Event Hooks?

Event hooks provide you with the ability to “hook in” your own custom behaviour into a given event. Concretely, an event is a specific moment in the agent’s lifecycle.

For example, when it:

• finishes generating a response
• encounters an error
• needs your permission to run a tool

In other words, if it can fit into the template “Every time X happens (an event), I want to run Y (a script)”, that’s a perfect application of event hooks.

What inspired event hooks?

While waiting for Rovo Dev CLI to complete, we saw a few recurring patterns:

• People would kick off a longer task, switch to another window, and then forget about the CLI until much later.
• Sometimes the agent would appear to still be working, but in reality it was blocked while waiting for user permission, so nothing progressed for minutes while the user wasn’t looking.
• After some duration of inactivity, we’d often need to refresh the whole model context, which is slower and more expensive than it needs to be.

Event hooks are our answer to that: a way for Rovo Dev CLI to support notifications while also remaining customisable for users to add more functionality beyond notifications.

As an intern, this was a perfect project: small enough to ship quickly, but powerful enough that people could immediately customise Rovo Dev to suit their own habits.

Common examples for using event hooks

• Sending a notification or sound when the agent requests permissions to use tools
• Running a linter, builds or tests when the agent is complete
• Opening your log file each time the agent runs into an error

Quick Start

As a quick start example, here’s how to play a sound notification when Rovo Dev requires tool permissions:

Step 1: From your acli rovodev run session, run /hooks

Step 2: Select on_tool_permission

Step 3: Select “+ Add new command”

Step 4: Add the following command to play a sound based on your OS:

macOS:

afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Bottle.aiff

Linux:

echo -e '\a'

Windows (PowerShell):

powershell [console]::Beep(1000, 300)

When the agent asks for tool permissions, you should now hear a noise. If you don’t:

• First, try running the command from your terminal directly to check that it works. If it doesn’t, you might need to adjust it or choose a different command that achieves the same result
• If the sound plays correctly in your terminal, open your config with /config and check the event hooks log file listed under the eventHooks section. That log should help pinpoint what went wrong.

Key takeaways

Event hooks let you script what should happen at key moments in the Rovo Dev CLI lifecycle, saving you time and reducing friction in your workflow by handling notifications, checks, and other routine tasks for you. Looking ahead, we’re adding more events and exploring event hook input and output support, which will open the door for users to customise their CLI experience with even richer automations.