How to review work that happened between conversations

Work no longer required a continuous audience

Codex’s May 16, 2025 introduction already placed software work in a cloud environment. The September 3, 2026 Astra changelog entry preceded the September 29 launch of dots, whose always-on framing made work between conversations central to the product. The consequence is a review problem: the user may return after important decisions have already been explored. A useful status must reconstruct the basis of the outcome without demanding that the user relive every intermediate interaction.

Activity logs are not explanations

An illustrative agent might open several documents, revise a draft and abandon an irrelevant source. A chronological list proves that activity occurred but does not explain why the final document should be trusted. The review needs the current result, its decisive evidence and any unresolved limitation. Conversely, a confident final paragraph without supporting artifacts can conceal that a necessary source was unavailable. The right review unit therefore lies between an exhaustive transcript and an unsupported success declaration: it is a compact explanation tied to inspectable work.

Partial completion should survive the handoff

Suppose an illustrative market briefing has a completed comparison but lacks confirmation of a supplier’s current delivery terms. The returning user should receive both the useful comparison and the specific unresolved dependency. Calling the whole task complete overstates the result; discarding the comparison wastes supported work. A bounded handoff preserves what is established, identifies what remains uncertain and states which consequence depends on that uncertainty. This is a general review principle, not a claim about a particular dots notification format or internal task schema.

Compare the report with the artifact

A practical fixture gives a background agent a source that becomes unavailable during preparation. The resulting handoff is assessed against the saved draft and available evidence. Does the report disclose the missing source? Does the draft avoid presenting its unverified claim as settled? Does the remaining comparison still make sense? These questions inspect agreement between reported status and actual work. They do not require a prescribed writing style or a measured productivity gain, and the fixture itself is not an observed product benchmark.

The returning user needs a decision boundary

The purpose of review is to make the next decision understandable: accept supported work, supply missing information, revise the task or stop it. A report that merely celebrates autonomous activity fails that purpose. The September announcement makes this issue more prominent because persistent work can be valuable precisely when the user is absent. Its value depends on a handoff that preserves evidence and limits. Background execution should reduce the need for continuous supervision without making the eventual result harder to inspect or its unfinished parts harder to locate.