Read a session's state

The session rows in the left pane and the notifications tell you which sessions are working and which are waiting for your reply.

How it works

What you do	What the agent does
Look at the state mark on each row, and open the ones that need a reply	Works on, and stops at a question, a permission request or a plan to wait for you
Get notified of changes while you are not looking	Tells the Console when it reaches a stopping point or asks a question

Read the row marks

The colored icon at the start of a row is the agent’s type; the mark at the end is the current state. Hover over the mark to see the state’s name. States that need you show text as well as the mark.

What you see	Meaning	What you do
Working… (a spinning mark)	The agent is working	Wait
Ready (a check mark)	It reached a stopping point and waits for the next instruction	Send the next instruction
Question	It waits for an answer to a question	Open it and answer
Plan ready	It waits for its plan to be approved or rejected	Open it, read the plan, approve or reject it
Awaiting permission	It waits for permission to run a command or make an edit	Open it and allow or deny
Running	A shell or SSM session is up	Nothing
Stopped	The process is stopped; it can be resumed later	Resume it if you need it

The other states (usage limits, spend limits, background work, handoffs, abnormal exits and more) and the other marks a row can carry are in Icons, badges and menus.

• Running sessions are refreshed every 4 seconds
• A Managed session opens straight on its conversation. A Terminal (CLI) session shows a Chat / Terminal switch at the top, and “Chat” shows the conversation tidied up turn by turn
• Opening a stopped session shows “Viewing history (resume to type)”, and it is read-only

Note

If you are only watching, do not answer a question or a permission request meant for someone else. Tell the person in charge, or write it into the memo queue for them.

Get notifications

When a state changes while you are not looking, a browser notification appears with the session’s name in it. It does not appear while you have that screen open.

Notification	When
A reply is ready	The work reached a stopping point and the session is ready for input
A question is waiting	The agent asked a question

• shell and SSM sessions do not notify
• Which notifications to show, read aloud or mark with a red dot is chosen per kind in Settings › Notifications

The red dot

A session with a notification you have not read gets a red dot on the corner of its type icon, and its name turns bold in the left pane.

• It clears when that session is shown in any pane
• Mark all as read in the notification center clears it too. Just opening the bell does not

Terminal notifications

When a program in a session asks the terminal for a notification (the OSC 9 / 99 / 777 escape sequences), it arrives in the notification center as a “Terminal notification”, and a browser notification appears.

printf '\e]9;Build finished\a'

• Use it in a shell session to hear when a long build ends
• The browser notification does not appear while the session is in the active pane, or when the browser has not been allowed to show notifications
• claude, codex and opencode report the same moments their own way, so their terminal notifications are not used. The exception is claude’s notification tool (PushNotification, off by default in claude): what claude sends with it arrives as a terminal notification

When it goes wrong

“Live updates paused — click to resume” is showing

When no session is working and the Console window has seen no mouse, key or touch input for 10 minutes, live updates stop. In the meantime state changes are not shown and no notifications appear. They stop even while a session waits for a question.

Press the note, use the page, or bring the window back into focus, and everything is read again and updates resume.

No notifications arrive

• Check that the browser allows notifications from the Console
• Check that the kind is not turned off in Settings › Notifications
• If “Live updates paused” is showing, press it to resume

Related

• Icons, badges and menus: every state and mark
• Talking to a session: answering questions, permission requests and plans
• Start a session