---
title: Background turns — replies that keep running
weight: 8000
extra:
  summary: "An assistant reply is a durable background job: leave the chat or the whole app and it keeps generating, notifies you when it's ready, and shows up on the Jobs page."
  status: Shipped
---

When you send a message, the reply doesn't run on the screen you started it from — it runs as a
durable background job, tracked in the local database. That one change is what lets a reply survive
you leaving the conversation, switching to another chat, or backgrounding the whole app.

## Why it matters

You can task an agent with something slow — a long tool-using turn, a big local model — and walk
away. The reply keeps generating, tells you when it's done, and is waiting for you when you come
back, instead of being cancelled the moment you navigate away.

## How it works

Leave a conversation while it's replying and the reply keeps running; return and the app
re-attaches to the same in-flight turn and resumes its live stream where it left off, rather than
starting over. Several conversations can generate at once. If the app or its background worker is
killed mid-reply, the turn resumes on its own once the app comes back.

The only thing that cancels a turn now is the explicit **Stop generating** button — which stays
visible on the conversation whenever its turn is running. Leaving the page or backgrounding the app
no longer stops it.

**On Android**, while any turn is running the app shows an ongoing "Generating response"
notification. That notification is what keeps the process — and the worker driving your reply —
alive while the app is in the background; it clears when the last turn finishes. When a reply lands
on a conversation you aren't looking at, a separate "Your reply is ready" notification appears and
opens that conversation when tapped. If an agent stops mid-turn to ask you a question, a
notification brings you to the prompt and clears once you answer.

The first time a turn starts, Android 13 and newer ask for notification permission. Denying it only
hides the notifications — the turn still runs.

**On Linux desktop**, a backgrounded window is never killed, so turns simply keep running with no
ongoing notification; completion notifications still appear.

### The Jobs page

The navigation drawer has a **Jobs** entry (badged with the count of active jobs) that lists
background work live. Each assistant turn appears with its tool calls nested beneath it, carrying a
status, who started it, timing, progress, and any error.

![The Jobs page — a running turn with its tool call nested beneath it, and a finished enrichment](/images/jobs.png)

From here you can restart a failed job, multi-select and delete finished ones, clear all finished
jobs at once, and see how many conversations are waiting for your input. Tapping a job opens its
conversation, scrolled to the message it produced. The list is scoped to the active workspace.

## What it doesn't do yet

- **Very long backgrounded generations on Android 15+** can be stopped by the operating system's
  6-hour/24-hour limit on this kind of background work; picking the turn back up across that limit
  isn't handled yet.
- **Completion notifications fire only on the device that started the turn**, and there's no setting
  to turn them off. Opening a conversation clears its ready-reply notifications; a pending question
  waits until you answer it.
- **Auto-resume after a crash** re-runs an interrupted turn only when any tool it was mid-way through
  is safe to repeat (a fetch, the current time); a turn interrupted while writing to memory stops
  with a retryable message instead.