Concepts
Sessions
On this page
A session is one agent or shell running in a real terminal. A direct chat has its own session; every live mission member has one too.
The runtime supplies its own terminal interface, authentication, commands and conversation history. Runner hosts the terminal, tracks its state and records the conversation identity needed to resume it. A role is a template; a session is a particular run.
Read the state
Working and idle indicators help you find active agents. Supported runtimes report those states through hooks; others use terminal activity as a baseline. An idle indicator is not proof that a task passed its checks. Some runtimes also report when they need an approval or answer; Supported agents lists the differences.
Stopped and crashed sessions have no running agent to receive input. Read the terminal and any error before choosing the next action.
Choose the right action
| Action | Effect |
|---|---|
| Stop | Ends the process and leaves the session available to resume |
| Resume | Continues a stopped agent's recorded conversation where supported |
| Restart a mission slot | Starts a fresh conversation for that member |
| Fork a chat | Creates another chat from the conversation, for runtimes that support forking |
| Archive a chat | Stops it and removes it from active chat lists; find it in Settings → Archived |
A shell can restart in its directory, but has no agent conversation to resume. Shell terminals close rather than archive. Closing a window saves its layout and can leave its sessions running; closing a pane or chat tab is a separate action, so read any confirmation before accepting it.
Quit, relaunch and recover
Runner's background service, runnerd, owns processes independently of the app window. Settings → General → When Runner quits offers Ask, Keep running and Stop sessions. Reopening after Keep running attaches to the live terminals.
If the processes were stopped for shutdown or an update, Resume running agents on launch controls their automatic recovery. Manually stopped sessions stay stopped until you resume them. Recovery depends on the agent's saved conversation identity and history; it cannot restore an unsaved conversation from terminal pixels alone.
If the daemon crashes, Runner reconnects and offers recovery for affected sessions. Use Settings → Diagnostics → Open log folder when a failure repeats. See Troubleshooting for a missing conversation or a failed launch.