Background Jobs
Some work takes minutes. Some takes hours. You should not have to babysit chat while the agent grinds through fifty companies or watches a long process complete. Background Jobs is the surface where work moves out of the live conversation and into a panel you can check in on. The donut under the composer spins while there is unfinished work.
Overview
- Indicator
- Donut under the composer, spins while any job is in flight
- Panel
- Click the donut to open the Jobs panel
- Job lifecycle
- Created, running, succeeded, failed, cancelled
- Live updates
- Status and steps update without a refresh
- Artifacts
- Files, canvases, and notes the job produced appear inline
- Missions
- Higher-level objectives with a plan and child jobs
Most chat turns finish in seconds. Anything that does not finish in seconds is a candidate to push into the background. The platform decides automatically when to do this so you do not lose chat responsiveness. You always know there is something running because the donut spins.
The donut indicator
The small circular indicator beneath the composer.
When at least one job is running, the donut animates. The fill ring reflects approximate progress when the job exposes step counts. Hovering shows a quick label of how many jobs are active. Clicking opens the full Jobs panel.
| Donut state | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Static and empty | No work in flight |
| Spinning, partial fill | One or more jobs running, progress reported |
| Spinning, indeterminate | Jobs running but no step count available |
| Red tint | At least one job has failed and is awaiting your review |
| Green pulse | A job has just succeeded and is awaiting acknowledgement |
When work goes to the background
The platform pushes work out of the live turn for any of three reasons.
| Trigger | Example |
|---|---|
| The work has a long natural runtime | Scraping a list of 200 prospects, building a dataset, transcribing a long recording |
| The work polls or waits | Watching a workflow finish, waiting for a signature on a contract, retrying a failed step |
| You asked for it to run later | Scheduling a job to fire at a specific time or on a recurring cadence |
Warm and cold work
Background work runs in one of two modes. You never have to choose — the platform routes it.
When the agent runs something in the background, it runs in one of two modes. The difference is whether the result comes back in the same turn or wakes a new one later.
| Warm | Cold | |
|---|---|---|
| Recorded | In memory only, no panel row | A row in the Jobs panel |
| Result | Folds back into the same turn | Wakes a new turn when it finishes |
| Survives | The current turn | A closed tab, a new session, hours later |
| Best for | Work the agent needs the result of right now | Long work you want to walk away from |
A warm job is the default for a command whose output the turn depends on: the agent kicks it off, keeps working, and the chat loop folds the result back in as soon as it lands, holding the turn open just long enough for whatever was waiting on it. A cold job is for work that outlives the moment — it gets a row in the Jobs panel, survives a closed tab, and pages the agent in a fresh turn when it completes.
The two share the same machinery; the only difference at launch is whether a completion callback is attached. That makes promotion automatic: if a turn reaches its limit while warm work is still running, the platform hands that work to the cold path so the result still arrives later instead of being lost.
Watching a live process with monitor
Some work you want to watch, not just wait on. The monitor tool attaches to a long-running command and streams its output live into chat under a monitor card, tailing the log as it grows. It stays in the turn up to a cap of about fifteen minutes; if the process runs longer, it hands off to the cold path and wakes you when it finishes.
The Jobs panel
One panel, all running and recent jobs.
Click the donut to open the panel. Each row is one job. The header shows the title, the owning agent, the status, and the elapsed time. Expanding a row shows the plan (the named steps), the live status per step, and any artifacts. Jobs from the last seven days stay visible by default; older ones are searchable by name.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Title | Short name the agent gave the job |
| Agent | Which agent owns this job |
| Status | Running, succeeded, failed, cancelled, or paused |
| Steps | Current step number out of total, plus the step kind |
| Started | When it kicked off |
| Duration | Time elapsed for in-flight jobs, total time for finished ones |
Missions
When the work is bigger than one job, it becomes a mission.
A mission is an outcome you want, broken down into a plan of steps. Each step is one job. Missions are how the platform handles work like building a campaign end to end, researching and then writing about a topic, or driving a multi-day deal motion. You can monitor the mission as a whole, expand it to see each step, and intervene if something looks wrong.
| Step kind | What it does |
|---|---|
| Research | Web searches, profile lookups, evidence gathering |
| Skill | Runs a specific named skill an agent owns |
| Sandbox | Spins up the Computer tab and runs commands or builds artifacts |
| Carousel | Generates a structured visual artifact like a slide deck |
| Subagent | Hands off to another named agent for a focused subtask |
| Hitl | Human in the loop. Pauses the mission until you confirm or edit |
| Mission step | Generic step kind for plan items that do not fit the others |
Monitoring a job
How to know what is happening without sitting on the page.
- 01Open the panelClick the donut. The panel slides in from the side.
- 02Expand the rowThe plan opens with each step in order. In-flight steps stream their progress live.
- 03Click any stepShows the input, the work the step did, and the output. Long outputs are scrollable in place.
- 04Leave it and come backNotifications surface on completion. The donut turns green on success, red on failure.
Cancelling and rerunning
Stop, restart, or pick up where a job left off.
| Action | Where | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Cancel | Job row menu | Stops the running step. Marks the job cancelled. Anything already produced stays. |
| Retry the failed step | Job row menu, only when status is failed | Reruns the failed step with the same input. Useful for transient errors. |
| Rerun from scratch | Job row menu | Creates a fresh job with the same brief. Old job stays in history for reference. |
| Pause | Job row menu, only on long missions | Holds the next step until you resume. |
| Resume | Paused job row | Continues from the next step. |
Use cases
Five concrete examples of background work.
Build a prospect list
You ask Cortex to find 200 SaaS founders in Europe matching a profile. Cortex queues a background mission. Step one is the search, step two is the enrichment, step three is writing the list to a canvas in Builder. You keep chatting about other things while it runs. The donut turns green when the canvas is ready.
Run a daily content drop
You schedule Pulse to draft a LinkedIn post every weekday at 8am, pulling from recent activity and your brand voice. The schedule is a recurring mission. Every weekday morning a new job appears in the panel with the draft ready for your review.
Watch a long workflow finish
A carousel generation can take a few minutes for a multi-slide deck. Specter and Pulse work together. The donut spins. When the deck is ready it lands in Builder and the donut turns green.
Drive a deal end to end
Striker takes a deal from first reply to proposal. The mission has steps for the discovery summary, the proposal canvas, sending it for signature, and tracking the signature status. Each step appears as a job. Some steps pause the mission with a human in the loop so you can review and approve before the next step runs.
Long-running scrape with checkpoints
A multi-source data pull where each source can be slow runs as a mission with one job per source. If one source fails you can retry just that step without rerunning the others.