Watching a run

A run says how it is going twice: once on its row, in a line you get without asking, and once in full when you open its log.

The activity line

Under a running row, once the run has a log, a second line reads how that run is going: the last call the agent made — a shell command as $ go test ./..., anything else by tool and target — and a sparkline of its recent activity, so a run that has fallen quiet reads as a flat line.

A run adopted from a previous lerp gets the same line rather than a fresh one: its log’s own timestamps are read back into the history, so a run that went quiet twenty minutes ago draws the long flat line it earned. A log that dates nothing has no times to place, and draws the short line of a fresh run.

The line takes the width the row is given: on a wide terminal’s full-width list it draws back about a quarter of an hour, and beside an open main pane it shows the recent end of that same history. A cell is fifteen seconds wherever it is drawn, so a narrow row reaches less far back rather than reading more coarsely.

Those are numbers to read, not a timeout. Lerp sets no threshold on them and never acts on one; ejecting a run that has stopped making progress stays the operator’s call.

The log

enter on a running ticket opens a live tail of its log in the main pane, with scrollback that survives the run’s exit, and esc gives the screen back.

The tail reads as agent activity rather than as bytes: tool calls one line each, prose as prose, and thinking collapsed to a single line with its token count. A runner whose output lerp does not recognize is shown exactly as it was written, with no configuration.

pgup/pgdn scroll it, end resumes following, and r toggles the pane to the runner’s raw output and back. The log on disk is untouched either way — the raw view is the same file, undecorated.

What the loop itself is doing

Agent output goes to each run’s own log, which is what the pane tails. The loop’s own diagnostics — provision, dispose, adopt, reap — go somewhere else: .lerp/loop.log, appended to across sessions. That is where to look when a run never started rather than when a run is going badly.