Sessions and tasks
Treat a session as a workbench for one job: your request, supporting materials, progress, and results stay together.
On this page
Write a useful request
Include your goal, materials, constraints, and expected deliverable. No special syntax is needed.
Compare these three supplier quotes. Focus on total cost, delivery time, and support, not just the lowest price. Use facts from the attachments and mark missing information as “Not provided”. Deliver a comparison table and a short list of questions for the suppliers.
For complex work, ask for a plan and clarification before execution. This reduces rework and unnecessary usage.
Continue or start fresh
Continue the same session when revising a document or following up on the same project. Start a new one for an unrelated task, a different customer, or a clean starting point.
Do not assume a new session knows every earlier conversation. Save durable project rules and conclusions in a cloud-drive document and provide it when needed.
Understand progress
| What you see | What it means | Next step |
|---|---|---|
| Thinking or using tools | Work is in progress | Follow recent activity |
| Waiting for authorization or input | Your response is needed | Review and complete the request |
| Retrying a model request | A temporary upstream failure | Watch for the next status |
| Stopped or failed | This run did not finish | Address the reported cause before continuing |
| Completed | This round has ended | Review and save the result |
Swipe sideways to see more of a wide table.
Elapsed time alone does not establish failure. Refreshing can help you see recent events, but it does not cancel a cloud task.
Stop, fork, or archive
Stop ends the current run. It does not undo files already written, messages already sent, or external changes already made.
Fork from here starts another session from a supported point. Its drive starts empty. Source files remain at their original locations and require the appropriate access permissions.
Archive closes out the session and destroys its work sandbox. Drive files remain. To resume the topic, use the option to continue in a new session.
Work with agent clones
An assistant can delegate suitable parts of a task to other available agents or its own clones, then combine the results. The collaboration view helps you follow the work.
Access depends on the current user's permissions and each calling agent's allowlist. Parallel work also consumes resources; ask for a clear division of responsibility and expected outputs.
At the end of a task, ask for completed items, unfinished items, file locations, and decisions still needed from you.