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Sound and haptics

kiln gives quiet, physical feedback as you work — a faint tick when you press a control, a soft note when a long action starts and another when it lands, and one deliberately louder call when an agent is waiting on you. It rides the Force Touch trackpad for haptics and the built-in macOS system sounds for audio, so nothing is bundled. Both channels are on by default and either can be turned off.

One seam

Kiln reaches for the meaning of a moment, not a specific sound:

  • Tap — a press
  • Pending — a long action just kicked off
  • Success — it landed well
  • Failure — it went wrong
  • Attention — an agent needs you — the loud one, plus a dock bounce

The sound-name and haptic-pattern mapping for each tone stays in one place, so the whole app can be retuned at once. Sounds are named entries from the system library; haptics use the Force Touch trackpad. A small per-tone throttle keeps a flurry of presses from stacking into a buzz.

Where it fires

  • Presses — controls and buttons tick when you press them.
  • Pending — a squad run, a "request changes" handoff, and a commit each play the pending note as they start.
  • Landings — a saved commit, a passed verification, a squad run finishing, a proposal applied to a buffer, a green test run, and a job exiting 0 play success; a failed commit, verification, test run, or job plays failure.
  • Attention — a task transitions into "needs you" and plays the attention call once. When kiln isn't frontmost it also bounces the dock.

Settings

Two user-global toggles in Settings ▸ General ▸ FeedbackSound effects and Haptic feedback — both default on. A project's .kiln config can shadow either, exactly like every other setting, via soundEnabled / hapticEnabled:

{ "soundEnabled": false }

Resolution is project → user → default, the same order the rest of the app uses.