QEDTasks and jobs
Two different kinds of pending work: edits waiting for your approval, and analysis running in the background.
Tasks and jobs
They look similar and mean opposite things. A task is waiting for you. A job is the app working so you do not wait.
Keeping them straight is most of understanding the bottom of the window.
Tasks: proposals awaiting your yes
When the assistant wants to change something in your project, it does not change it. It writes a task, and the task sits there until you open it.
| Stage | What is true of your files |
|---|---|
| Proposed | Nothing has changed |
| You open it | Still nothing has changed. You are reading a diff |
| You accept | Now, and only now, the file is written |
| You discard | Nothing has changed, and the task is gone |
This is why it is safe to ask the assistant for something ambitious, like reformatting a whole folder. The worst outcome is a task you decline.
Jobs: work happening in the background
A job is the app reading your manuscript: extraction, analysis, re-reading scenes you edited. Jobs are not waiting on you, and you can keep writing while they run.
Because analysis is content-addressed, a job usually does far less than you expect. Editing one scene does not re-read the book; it re-reads what actually changed and reuses the rest.