Progress timeline

On this page

• Reading the chart
• Choosing what you see
• What it will tell you it isn’t showing
• Docking it beside the terminal
• What it can’t tell you

Behind the scenes: the design note docs/design/progress-timeline.md argues the why — it is a contributor document and is not part of this site.

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Press Alt+W (or the timeline icon — dots over an axis — in the pane header) on any orchestration pane to overlay a time axis of what your group has been doing: agents spawning and exiting, prompts delivered, reports coming back, task-board transitions, review verdicts and merge gates — plus, from GitHub itself, when issues were opened and closed and when PRs were opened, merged, or closed unmerged.

It is read-only. It starts nothing, changes nothing, and adds no background work of its own: it re-reads the same audit log the audit viewer shows, plus one read-only gh query. Like every other panel it floats over the terminal and never resizes it — press Esc (or ✕) to return, or dock it beside the terminal (see below).

The button appears on every pane in an orchestration group — the orchestrator’s and every worker’s — because the data is the whole group’s.

Reading the chart

Each dot is one event, placed at the instant it happened. Dots are grouped into lanes by category, top to bottom:

Lane	What lands there
group	the group being created, resumed, paused, ended — and incoming intake signals
agents	agents spawned and exited
work	prompts delivered to an agent, reports coming back, task-board status changes
gates	review verdicts, merge gates, release gates
GitHub	issues opened/closed, PRs opened/merged/closed-unmerged
ops	everything with no lane of its own — delivery plumbing, compaction, watch registrations. Off by default

When several events land in the same spot, they collapse into one cluster dot labelled with how many it holds. Hover any dot for a one-line summary; click it to list its events underneath the chart, and click a row there to see the raw record behind it.

Choosing what you see

• Window presets — 1h, 6h, 12h (the default), 24h, 72h, All. All stretches back to the oldest event that was loaded.
• Category chips — one per lane. Click to hide or show that lane. Turning a lane off never unloads anything; the chart says which lanes are off, underneath it.
• ▶ follow — re-poll for new activity. GitHub is re-read on a much slower cadence than the audit log (it shells out to gh), and ⟳ forces both immediately.

What it will tell you it isn’t showing

A chart is uniquely good at looking complete, so this one states its own boundaries in plain sentences under the axis. You may see any of:

• the audit log is loaded at its cap — the newest 5000 entries are in; anything older than the instant named is not.
• audit coverage starts at T — the window reaches further back than the log does. Empty space to the left of that instant means not recorded, not nothing happened.
• GitHub issues/PRs capped at the 100 most recently active, together with complete back to T — nothing left out by that cap has been active since T.
• GitHub activity unavailable — the gh read failed (not signed in, no network, not a GitHub repo). The audit half of the chart is unaffected and still complete; only issue and PR dots are missing.
• n events carried no usable timestamp — some agent shims fall back to a zero timestamp when they can’t read the clock. Those events are counted here rather than plotted at 1970.
• n audit rows could not be read — a corrupted line never blanks the view.
• lanes switched off — which categories you have hidden.

If a cluster holds more events than the detail list shows, it says how many it left out. Nothing here is ever silently dropped.

Docking it beside the terminal

The ⬒ button docks the timeline to the left, right or bottom edge of the pane instead of floating it, with a draggable divider — the same mechanism every other panel uses (up to three docked at once, one per edge). A docked timeline re-draws itself to whatever width you give it.

If the timeline is docked on an orchestrator pane when you quit, it comes back docked on the same edge next launch. Your window preset and category chips are not restored — you get the 12-hour default again, the same way a restored audit log comes back without its filters.

What it can’t tell you

• Only what the audit log and GitHub recorded. It doesn’t read agent transcripts, so “the agent thought about X for ten minutes” isn’t here.
• A merge gate is not a merge. Orrerix audits its permission to merge and then runs gh, which can still fail. A dot reading “merge allowed” means exactly that; only a GitHub merged dot means the PR actually merged.
• A first kickoff and a later delivery look the same, because the audit record for them is the same shape. Both appear as deliveries, labelled with who sent them.