Waiting, finished or dead: they all look the same.
You have several sessions running. One is waiting on you, one finished an hour ago, and one quietly died. From the outside all three look the same. In one developer's words, the hard part is “knowing which session needed me and which one quietly finished or died.”
A terminal doesn't report anything on its own.
A session waiting for your answer looks exactly like one that's working. A session that crashed leaves no message, because the thing that would have written one is the thing that stopped.
And a session's own last message tells you what it meant to do, not what happened.
What doesn't work.
Tabbing through terminals. It works at three sessions and falls apart at ten.
A notification for every message. You learn to ignore them, the important one included.
Trusting the session's last line. “Done, all tests pass” is a claim, not a check.
What actually helps.
Most of this isn't us.
Have each session write its state somewhere shared when it changes: working, waiting on you, done, failed.
Use a heartbeat that comes from the process, not from the model, so “it stopped” shows up even when nothing could say so.
Check with something other than the session itself, like the server log or the job list.
Put “waiting on you” at the top, where you'll see it.
We check from the outside.
Each of our machines sends the server a heartbeat on its own, separate from anything a model says. Our checks read that server-side view rather than the machine's own report.
On 13 October a runner looked fine on its own machine: installed, started, no errors. The server-side check found it had never signed in and never sent a heartbeat. The outside view was right, and the fix went to the person who could sign it in.
| What was measured | What the record says |
|---|---|
| what the machine reported about itself | installed and started, no errors |
| what the server-side check found | “not signed in and not heartbeating. The server has never registered it.” |
| recorded | 13 October 2026, 20:04 UTC |
| where it's from | Vinculum's own project record, which runs on Vinculum |
Where a shared memory fits.
Vinculum gives each session a card with its state and last heartbeat, all in one place.
It still needs the sessions to report, and a board can mislead you too, so its counts are worth checking against the source now and then.
Common questions.
Can't I just turn on notifications?
Per-message notifications train you to ignore them. A notification for one state, “waiting on you”, is the one worth having.
Why a heartbeat instead of asking the session?
A session that has crashed can't answer. A heartbeat that stops arriving tells you that without the session's help.