Command Center and activity hub

A team using Disco Parrot is doing several things at once. A chat with the agent on this morning's bug. A Flow run finishing up the last initiative. A background task that has been compiling for the last twenty minutes. The screen you are on at any given moment is one of those things; the Command Center is where you see all of them at the same time and pick the one you want to return to.

The Command Center is a side panel that slides in from the right of the product. You open it from the activity button in the top bar, the panel pushes in over whatever you are doing, and you read or click into any of the work that is currently in motion. Close it and you are back where you were. The list on the panel is live; new activity arrives the moment it happens, and a chat that just finished a turn updates without you reopening anything.

What lands on the panel

The panel shows three kinds of work that are happening in your name:

• Chats with the agent, scoped to an initiative or a plan or a skill, or running unattached as an Ask.
• Flow runs in flight or just finished, with the step they are on right now.
• Background tasks that you sent off to run on their own.

Each one is a card the size of a notification, with the title at the top, a small badge telling you the state at a glance, and a few details that fit the kind of work. A chat card shows the entity it is scoped to. A flow card shows the step it is currently working on, with a progress indicator. A task card shows what it is doing, the file count it has touched, and what it has spent in agent time.

Active now, then recent

The panel is split into two sections by time, not by project or kind.

Active Now holds the work that is currently in motion: Flow runs that are running or paused at a checkpoint, tasks that are queued or executing or waiting for review, and chats that have had a message in the last thirty minutes. This is the "where can I go to keep working" list.

Recent holds the work that finished or went quiet in the last twenty-four hours. A Flow that completed an hour ago, a chat from this morning that you stepped away from, a task that you reviewed and merged. The recent list is shorter (capped so it does not become noise) and the cards are slightly faded so it is clear they are no longer in flight.

Older work does not show up here. The full, filterable index of every chat and Flow run across the workspace lives on the Sessions page; the Command Center is the live hub for the things you care about right now.

Reading a card at a glance

Each card carries just enough information to tell you what is happening without making you click in. The state is the part to look at first.

A green dot means the work is active and moving. A small spinner badge means the agent is mid-turn. A red Error badge means something went wrong and the work is paused waiting for you. A blue New badge calls out activity since you last looked, on chats you have not opened recently.

Beyond the state, each kind of card shows what is most useful for that kind of work:

• Chat cards show the conversation title and the entity the chat is scoped to (an initiative, a plan, a skill, or "Unlinked" for an Ask conversation). The timestamp tells you when the last turn landed.
• Flow run cards show the run's title and a small progress indicator with the step it is on right now ("Step 3 of 5"). On Active Now, the card expands to show the step timeline; on Recent, the card shows the run's terminal status.
• Task cards show the task title, the agent turns used so far, the file count it has touched, and the running cost in agent time. A task that ran into a status change (queued to provisioning to running to review) reflects that as the new state appears.

Filtering down when there is a lot in motion

A team with several Flows running and a handful of active chats can fill the panel quickly. The header carries type filter chips (All, Chats, Flows, Tasks) so you can narrow the panel to one kind of work at a time. Pick Flows when you are watching a long run; pick Chats when you are bouncing between conversations; pick Tasks when you are reviewing what came back overnight.

The filter holds for as long as the panel is open. Close the panel and the next open returns to All, which is usually the right starting point for the morning.

Resume from the card

A click on a card takes you to whatever surface is the right place to keep working on that piece of work. A chat card opens the chat panel on the initiative it is scoped to, with the conversation history loaded and the sidecar reconnected. A flow card opens the run's detail page on the Sessions index, where the step timeline and the transcript are. A task card opens the chat where the background work was started, with the conversation restored. The Command Center is the entry point; the surface it lands you on is the surface that work belongs to.

If a task or a chat needs your attention (a paused checkpoint, a queued review, a failure that needs a decision), the card shows a small indicator and the badge tells you what the state is. You can move from the panel to the work, make the call, and come back to the panel without breaking your train of thought.

Send the work to the background

A chat with the agent can take a while when the work is interesting. Twenty turns into building an initiative, you do not have to sit at the screen and watch the agent type. The chat panel carries a Send to background action that hands the conversation off to a background task; the panel closes, the work keeps going on its own, and the task shows up on your Command Center while it runs.

You will get a card for it in Active Now. The card updates as the agent works through turns, files get edited, and steps complete. The badge on the activity button in the top bar carries the count of active work, so even when the panel is closed you can see at a glance whether something is still in motion.

This is the difference between "I am chatting with an agent right now" and "I have several agents working on things in parallel and I check in when the next one is ready." Either pattern works; the Command Center is what makes the second one possible without losing track of any of it.

How you find out it finished

When a background task hits a moment that needs you (it finishes, it pauses at a checkpoint, it fails, it produces something for review), a notification lands in your inbox. The notifications bell in the top bar shows an unread count; click the bell to read what happened. Most teams configure the same kind of work to also notify them by email or in Microsoft Teams; the rules are set in your notification preferences and the same event flows through whatever channels you have on.

The card on the Command Center moves at the same time. A completed run slides from Active Now to Recent and the green dot turns into the run's terminal status (success, failure, blocked). A run that paused at a checkpoint keeps its card in Active Now with the badge on the card indicating the pause. Either way, clicking the card takes you to the right place to act on what the work surfaced: the chat panel for a chat, the run timeline for a Flow, the conversation for a task that backgrounded a chat.

The point is that you do not have to keep checking. Send the work off, switch contexts, do something else; the bell tells you when there is something to look at, the badge tells you what state your work is in, and the card on the panel is the entry point back into the work itself.

Live, all the way down

The cards on the panel update without a refresh. A Flow that completes a step shows the new step on its card. A chat that finishes a turn updates its timestamp. A task that moves from queued to running to review reflects each move the moment it happens. You do not have to click into anything to see whether a piece of work needs you; the badge on the card tells you, and the badge on the activity button in the top bar tells you when you are not even looking at the panel. How that liveness is built, a single change-signal stream the panel turns into refetches, is covered in real-time architecture.

You can resize the panel by dragging its left edge. The width holds for the rest of your session; cross-session persistence is a follow-up.

A personal hub, not a team feed

The activity you see is your own. The chats you started, the Flow runs you launched, the tasks running under your account. A teammate's runs do not appear here; their cards are on their own Command Center. The whole-workspace history is on the Sessions page, which is where you reach when you want to find a Flow that someone else on the team ran last week.

The line between the two is worth being clear about: the Command Center answers "what am I working on right now," and the Sessions index answers "what has happened across the workspace." Both surfaces read from the same underlying records; the framing is what differs.

When there is nothing in flight

The panel does not pretend there is something there when there is not. If you have no active work and nothing recent, you see an empty state with a one-line nudge to start an initiative, a plan, or a Flow. The activity button in the top bar still shows, without a badge, so the panel is always one click away when you do have something running.

Notifications are a separate inbox, reached from a different button in the top bar. The two systems do different things: the Command Center tracks what is in flight; notifications tell you about things that happened (a comment, an assignment, a status change) regardless of whether you are the one who set them off.