A tan is already running
What do you want to do?
Before typing, distinguish three things:
- Main chat: ordinary prompts address Main.
- Agent Hub: selecting a row does not yet focus its chat. Inspect the full agent ID, not merely the display name
tan. - Focused tan chat: after successful activation, look for the notice beginning
Viewing agent …with the intended ID. The transcript and status line are retargeted to that session. The dimmed editor outline is only a secondary cue—not a unique identity.
After any automatic return to Main, recheck the target before submitting an existing draft.
| I want to… | Action in this implementation | Important distinction |
|---|---|---|
| Find the tan | Open the runtime Agent Hub with Alt+A or Ctrl+S; inspect its exact ID. From Main, use /jobs for background-job status. | A Tan agent ID and its background job ID are different. |
| Watch or talk to it | In the Hub, select the exact Tan row and press Enter. | A parked tan may need revival before focus succeeds. |
| Correct its current work | In the verified tan chat, type a plain-language correction and press Enter while it is streaming. | This queues steering; it is not a guaranteed immediate hard interruption. |
| Give it the next task | In the verified tan chat, submit with Ctrl+Q or Ctrl+Enter while it is streaming. | A follow-up waits until the current work would otherwise yield. |
| Return to Main without cancelling it | In ordinary focused chat, Escape clears a nonempty text draft; with an empty draft, Escape returns to Main. Inspect the result after each press. | Do not blindly press Escape twice: the second press might already be acting on Main. |
| Return using Left | With an empty focused editor, deliberately press Left, Left. | It returns directly to Main, despite the current banner saying “parent.” |
| Continue a finished tan | Find its parked row, press Enter, then send a new, scoped prompt. | This continues the agent conversation; it does not restart its old background job. |
| Interrupt a turn to advance a queued correction | With the tan streaming, a message already queued, and no text or images in the editor, press Enter. | This requests a turn abort. Queues, job cancellation, and agent killing remain separate. |
| Cancel its background job | Ask Main to discover the exact current job identity, then cancel that job ID through the Hub tool. | /jobs itself is a status command, not a cancellation command. |
| Explicitly kill the tan | In the runtime Hub, inspect the exact Tan row, then press x. | The explicit-kill path requests a durable tombstone and retains the transcript. It does not undo edits. |
The ordinary focused-Escape behavior above assumes no higher-priority panel or speech playback and no global loop-mode handling taking precedence. See Leave and switch safely.
Two common wrong turns
/tanlaunches work. It has no management subcommands in this snapshot. A word such asstopafter/tanis work text—not an instruction to stop an existing tan.- The runtime Agent Hub opened by Alt+A/Ctrl+S is not the
/agentsdashboard for configuring agent definitions.
Tangent work and live control · Source chapter: tan/a-tan-is-already-running. Original evidence remains scoped to its recorded snapshot.