Managing Work

The sidebar shows the session state, active todos, flagged files, and background jobs.

The sidebar sits on the right side of the screen and shows the live state of your session in four panes:

Session. Your current model and facet.
Flagged files. Files the model or Polytoken has marked as important to the work at hand.
Async jobs. Background work currently running.
Todos. The task list for the work in progress.

Collapse the sidebar to give the conversation more width when you want the full width for the conversation, and open it again to see the panes.

The flagged-files pane reflects choices the model and Polytoken make, not choices you control. The plan facet, for instance, flags the plan the model is working from. Polytoken marks a flagged file in one of two ways: it keeps the file’s contents alongside the session, or it records the file by name alone. Sessions explains what that distinction does.

Double-click a flagged file to copy its absolute path to your clipboard. This is handy when you need to paste the path into another tool or a shell command.

Mini mode

When the terminal is too narrow to show the sidebar and the conversation side by side, Polytoken switches to mini mode. The sidebar starts retracted so the conversation has the full width, and a small toggle by the prompt opens it. Because there is no room beside the conversation, an open sidebar in mini mode floats over it rather than narrowing it. Make the terminal wide enough again and the sidebar returns to its docked layout.

The column width that triggers mini mode is tui.sidebar.collapse-threshold (default 82). Raise it to enter mini mode sooner, or lower it to keep the docked sidebar on tighter terminals. See Configuration for the full setting.

Todos

A todo is one task in a list. The model uses todos to track work that takes several steps: as it works, it adds todos, marks each one in progress, and completes them.

Each todo has a status (pending, in progress, done, or blocked), and a todo can depend on others. Polytoken enforces those dependencies: a todo cannot become in progress or done until everything it depends on is done, and you cannot delete a todo that others depend on.

The todos pane shows the active list: todos that are pending, in progress, or blocked. Completed todos drop off the sidebar once they are done, but they are not gone. Typing /todo opens the full todo view as an overlay, which includes every retained todo. Close it with Esc or by clicking outside the overlay, which also returns focus to the prompt. The list belongs to the session: it carries through compacting and clearing unchanged, and a rewind restores it to the point you return to. See Sessions.

Jobs

A job is work running in the background while you keep going. The common kind is a subagent, a separate agent the model starts to handle a bounded task. A job can also be a shell command left to run on its own.

A job moves through states as it runs: working, completed, failed, or cancelled. The async jobs pane shows what is currently running, and typing /jobs opens the full jobs view as an overlay, which includes every retained job along with each job’s status and output. You can cancel a running job from there. Close the overlay with Esc or by clicking outside it. You do not start jobs yourself; the model starts them.

For how the model uses subagents, see Subagents.