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Course outline

AcademyModule 7 · Controls and connections

Activity center: progress and suggestions

Lesson 2 of 310 min

What you'll learn

  • You can read the Activity feed and tell live jobs, history rows, and pending offers apart.
  • You can act on lifecycle advisor offers, or politely defer them with "Later" and "Don't ask again".
  • You can turn a task-suggestion badge above the composer into a finished deliverable with one click.
  • You can follow the agent's in-chat activity rows and safely stop a background command or a goal.

The activity center shows progress and results for background work, including note extraction, automatic titles, and topic map updates. Open it with the bell button in the sidebar navigation row.

Learn how to review completed work, check running tasks, and manage suggestions for what to do next.

The bell and the Activity feed

The bell sits in the sidebar's nav row — the strip of buttons across the top of the left sidebar, after Agent, Workspace and Knowledge graph. Its tooltip reads "Activity". Click it and the feed takes over the sidebar: whichever mode you were in steps aside, and it stays that way until you click the bell again or pick one of the three modes beside it.

A thin strip of controls sits above the rows: "Mark all read" while anything is unread, an archive button whose menu holds "Archive all" and "Clear" (more on what that clears later), and a filter button offering "All notifications", "Unread" and "Archived". Before anything happens you see "No recent activity". The filter you pick sticks when you leave the feed and come back. It has no keyboard shortcut.

  • Unread count badge: a blue pill on the bell with the number of rows you haven't read. Past nine it reads "9+".
  • The bell is also a lamp: while the feed is showing, the bell is highlighted and the word "Activity" slides in beside its icon — the same treatment Agent, Workspace and Knowledge graph get in that row. Exactly one of the four is ever lit, because each one names the sidebar you're actually looking at.
  • The feed can open itself in three cases: when you open a workspace with an offer waiting, when a knowledge-graph build starts, and when an agent action in your active tab hits a wall you can fix. The build case opens it so the progress bar is right there. Mid-session re-checks only update the bell.

Notification vs. activity, record vs. offer

A notification records something that already happened ("Extracted", "Topic map updated"), or it asks you a question. An activity is a job running right now. It shows live under "In progress" with a spinner and disappears the moment the job ends. Activities are never saved. Notifications are.

Notifications come in two shapes. Record rows are read-only history, so clicking one opens the note it points to. Actionable offers carry an accept button and stay in the feed until you answer them. Neither "Clear" nor "Archive all" sweeps them away.

What "In progress" shows

RowWhat you see
Agent turnDocument title plus "AI editing". Click it to jump to the tab where the agent is working.
Single-note extractionFile name plus "Extracting" and a spinner. One row per note being tagged.
Bulk extraction"Extracting knowledge" with a done/total counter and a progress bar. One row stands in for the whole batch.
Credit-paused note"Paused until your limit resets", with a still, dim ring instead of a spinner, so it reads as waiting.
Vocabulary tuning"Teach the AI your field" plus "Tuning vocabulary" while the tune call runs.
Suggestion generation"Preparing suggestions…" while the task-suggestion pool is built.

Below "In progress" comes the history, grouped under "Today", "This week" and "Earlier". Each record row has a title and a short relative time ("just now", then 5m / 2h / 3d). Some rows add a detail line: "Extracted", "Extracted {n} documents", "Document renamed", or "Topic map updated" with "{n} themes found across your notes."

Unread rows carry a small blue dot and a bold title, and clicking one marks it read and opens the note. For an auto-change it also opens the conversation with the diff card, so you can review or revert. Repeats of the same kind for the same file coalesce into one row that refreshes in place, so an "Extracted" on every save doesn't pile up. Hover a row you're done with and an archive button appears at its right edge; archived rows leave the working list and wait under the "Archived" filter.

The lifecycle advisor's offers

The lifecycle advisor watches your workspace and posts offers. The six kinds are stages of one pipeline, so they stand in that order, most-upstream first: up to three cards stay open at the top of the feed, and any remainder folds under a "{n} more" toggle, so the feed never becomes a wall of competing buttons. Here they are in priority order.

OfferAccept buttonCan you defer it?
Capability blocked, e.g. "Sign-in required", "Connection needed", "Web search is off""Sign in" / "Open Connections" / "Open Settings"No controls. Session-only, gone after a restart.
"Extraction was interrupted""Resume"No snooze. "Discard" is the only way out.
"Extraction needs a retry""Retry all""Later" / "Don't ask again"
"Build this workspace's knowledge graph?""Build""Later" / "Don't ask again"
"Notes changed outside the app""Re-extract""Later" / "Don't ask again"
"Tune domain vocabulary?""Tune""Later" / "Don't ask again"

How "Later" and "Don't ask again" work

"Later" defers an offer kind for 7 days. "Don't ask again" turns it off for good. Both are remembered per workspace, per offer kind. So turning down "Tune?" in one workspace doesn't silence it in another, and it doesn't silence "Build?" in the same workspace either.

Offers also pull themselves back the instant the work they ask about actually starts, so you can never kick off the same build twice. If work still remains after the batch drains, they come back.

Task suggestions above the composer

Open an empty new chat and a badge strip appears above the composer, headed "Make from this workspace". Once the knowledge graph is analyzed, the app builds a pool of content-grounded suggestions and shows up to 5 badges. At most 3 are deliverables (a document, plan, comparison, itinerary, review, or summary); the rest are structural nudges.

Each badge carries a category icon, a title, a "why this" hint, and a "Make" arrow that auto-sends a ready-made prompt to the agent. The × dismisses that suggestion for good in this workspace. The "…" button regenerates the set, toggles auto-refill so the pool tops itself up as you work through it, or hides the strip for 7 days.

  • "What could '{theme}' connect to?" for an isolated theme, with the hint "These notes sit apart from the rest of your workspace".
  • "What runs through '{label}'?" for a hub concept, hinted as "It's the hinge joining several of your themes".
  • "What connects '{a}' and '{b}'?" for two big themes that have no bridge between them yet.
  • Isolate an entity on the empty-chat graph backdrop and the strip pivots to "Continue from '{label}'", offering "Everything you know about '{label}'": one page, every fact cited to its source note.

Activity inside the chat thread

Goal and tool activity rows live inside the conversation. They never surface in the Activity feed. The standard system line shows the agent's tool calls and thinking with a live timer, so "Thinking for 12s" becomes "Thought for 12s" once the step lands.

Each row carries an inline args summary and a chevron that expands the output, diff, or reasoning. File-write rows arrive already expanded, so you can review the diff right there. A running background command carries a "Stop background command" button.

  • A thread with an active /goal pins a goal row at its tail. It reads "Goal: {condition}" plus a status: "Working… {n}m so far", "achieved", or a line saying it tried for a while and summarizing what got done.
  • Its action links are "Keep going" (resume after a hard stop) and "Dismiss". While a run is in flight, "Dismiss" turns into a two-step "Stop" then "Stop this?" confirm, so a stray click can't kill an autonomous run.
  • When the agent resumes a turn on its own after a background command finishes, that turn opens with a thin status line saying the background task finished and it's continuing.

Read your feed, then dismiss one suggestion

  1. Open a workspace you've been writing in, and click the bell in the sidebar's nav row (tooltip "Activity"). The feed takes over the sidebar.
  2. Scan it. Anything under "In progress" is running now; the history below sits under "Today", "This week" and "Earlier".
  3. Click one record row, say an "Extracted" or "Document renamed" entry. Then hover a row you're finished with and click the archive button at its right edge.
  4. Now open an empty new chat and find the "Make from this workspace" strip above the composer.
  5. Click × on one badge you don't want, then click another badge's "Make" arrow.

Opening the feed by hand already marked it read, so the badge is gone before you click anything. The row you click opens its note; the archived one leaves the list and waits under the "Archived" filter. The dismissed badge never comes back in this workspace, and the accepted one auto-sends its prompt so the agent starts on the deliverable right away.

Housekeeping: how the feed keeps itself tidy

  • The feed is stored per workspace, so switching workspaces gives you a clean, focused view of exactly the one you're in.
  • The feed tidies itself: older rows retire after about a month, so it always reads as a snapshot of what's recent.
  • A capability-blocked card lives for the current session, and the agent raises it again the instant it hits the same wall.
  • The advisor is always watching. It re-checks what to offer on workspace open, on file changes, on a timer, on window focus, and after every extraction batch. File changes even include git pulls and edits made in other editors.
activity
A job running right now, shown live under "In progress". It's never saved to history.
notification
A persisted feed row: something that happened, or a question the app is asking.
record row
Read-only history. Clicking it opens the note (and any diff conversation) and marks it read.
actionable offer
A card with an accept button. It stays in the feed until you answer it, and it survives "Clear".
lifecycle advisor
The watcher that posts the six offer kinds. It orders them most-upstream first and keeps up to three open at a time.
coalescing
Repeats of the same kind for the same file refresh one row instead of stacking.

Reading rows and clearing the feed

Opening the feed by clicking the bell marks the whole thing read — that click is you saying you've seen it, and the badge drops to zero. A feed that opened *itself* acknowledges nothing, so those rows stay bold until you click them or press "Mark all read".

Clear, in the archive button's menu, deletes the record rows you've already dealt with and deliberately leaves your open offers in place, so a quick sweep never buries a question you still owe an answer. "Archive all" in the same menu obeys the same rule, but files the rows away instead of deleting them.

Now that you can read the feed, the next lesson covers the plans and credits that fuel all this background work, including that "Paused until your limit resets" row.

Activity center: progress and suggestions