Orchestration in the timeline
When Slate orchestrates a task, it can hand pieces to several agents at once and run them in parallel. Those agents show up as a grid of inline subagent cards, one per agent. Double-click any card to jump into that agent’s session and follow the full conversation.Subagent cards
Subagent cards
Subagent cards show the practical state of each child agent:
- Status and progress while the child agent runs
- Interruption if a run is stopped before finishing
- Completion when the child agent finishes
- Changed-file summaries so you can quickly see what the child agent touched
Subagent sessions and overlay
Subagents have their own child sessions. From the current parent session, open the subagent overlay to review those child sessions without losing the parent context. In the overlay, you can move through the child sessions for the current parent session, inspect their status and activity, and open a child session when you need more detail.Review child sessions
Browse the subagent sessions that belong to the current parent session.
Open details
Open a child session when you need to inspect its work more closely.
Return to parent
Use parent-session navigation to get back to the original session afterward.
Background agents
Some work can continue in the background. When background agents are running, Slate shows a running indicator so you know there is active work outside the current foreground turn. Background agents let Slate hand off work without blocking the main conversation. While one or more agents run in the background, you can keep talking with Slate: plan next steps, queue up additional tasks, or spin up more agents to parallelize work across several tasks at once. You do not need to track when background agents finish. When one completes, Slate receives a notification,◉ Background agent notification received, and surfaces the results in conversation so you can see what happened without leaving your current chat window.
Use the background-agents sidebar to manage that work:
Open
Inspect a running background agent.
Stop
Interrupt background work you no longer want to continue.
Open session
Jump to the session for that background agent.
Built-in programs in the UI
goal and deep-research are built-in programs. They are user-visible workflows, not something you need to author before using Slate.
Open the Programs sidebar to browse program runs. Program run cards summarize each run, and the program views help you inspect the work at different levels.
Run cards
Review the current state and summary for a program run.
Graph view
See the workflow shape and dependencies.
Details view
Inspect more information about a selected run or step.