The factory is where work in progress is stored. Tasks, lanes, plans, schedules and reports can all be accessed from here, giving you one place to find out "what is happening right now".
What it is for
Mission Control helps you identify "what needs my attention?". The factory shows you "what is currently running and how it is progressing?".
The distinction matters when you have more than a couple of tasks in progress. Mission Control is a triage interface; the factory is an operations dashboard.
What you can see
- tasks grouped by status, including those that are queued and those that are blocked
- lanes, and the progress of the work within each lane
- plans and the current phase of each plan
- schedules and their execution history
- reports
Watching a task run
Open a running task to monitor it in real time: view the steps taken, tools used, files modified and test results as they are generated.
It’s worth trying this a few times at the start. Watching two or three tasks from start to finish teaches you more about writing a clear specification than any amount of documentation — you see precisely where an agent had to make assumptions.
After that, there’s no need to keep watching. Notifications will alert you when action is required.
Intervening
You can pause, cancel or send a running task back with comments. See When a task gets stuck or fails to know when each option applies.
Automation
Work does not always begin with someone entering a description:
- Schedules run tasks on a recurring basis.
- Sentinel monitors for specific conditions and can initiate remedial work.
- Hooks respond to platform events.
- Reports summarise past activity at set intervals.