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Persistent Goals

Start and supervise a goal​

  1. Open an idle workspace chat and choose the account or team that should do the work.
  2. Open the composer workflow menu and select Goal…. Enter the objective and optional model-call or token allowances, then select Start goal.
  3. Follow the goal card for progress and cumulative usage. Send a message to refine the request while keeping the objective.
  4. Use Pause or Stop to stop automatic continuation. Resume returns to Work mode. Edit saves changes while paused. End closes the goal without claiming the objective was achieved.

Only one unfinished goal can belong to a chat. Switching to Ask, Plan, or Grill pauses it. Changing the model or team also pauses it; save the newly selected configuration through Goal before resuming. Editing the objective or allowances preserves accumulated usage.

Queued messages take priority over automatic continuation. Unsent drafts and attachments stay in the composer. A finished turn is an intermediate result: completion requires current recorded checks or explicit human acceptance where a criterion requires judgment. The coordinating agent's written success claim does not replace tool evidence.

Understand allowances​

Usage accumulates across turns, helpers, team stages, retries, and restarts. Goal allowances do not replace profile or team limits. Tokens describe provider-reported input and output, not currency or remaining subscription quota. In-flight responses can exceed an allowance, and provider-internal work can only be counted as exposed by the provider.

If an allowance cannot be enforced from the available measurements, the goal pauses. Exhausted, blocked, and paused goals need attention before continuing.

Reopen and recover​

By default, Locus must be running for work to execute. Quitting saves the goal; reopening restores eligible goals with their original account, team, and workspace. An explicitly enabled independent runtime can own opted-in work after the app closes. The host must remain available, and native desktop actions wait for Locus.

Review partial work and usage before resuming an interrupted operation with an unknown outcome. Locus does not automatically replay it. Missing accounts or workspaces, incompatible team changes, and repeated missing progress can stop continuation.

Permissions and required questions keep their normal behavior. Losing a connection or waiting longer never grants approval. Schedules, workflows, Task Capsules, and Identity tasks have separate execution lifecycles. In 3.0, a saved agent's interactive chat can also use a goal while retaining its owner. Ordinary turns use the owner profile; explicit team stages use their configured specialists within the chat's permissions.

Verified progress and task details​

Open the goal's task details for the original request, saved plan, evidence, outputs, findings, usage, and blocker. Working and Checking are separate states. Needs review means a criterion cannot be accepted automatically. Accept result records your acceptance separately from machine verification.

Progress is based on saved milestones such as answered decisions, verified steps, passing checks, changed declared outputs, and supported findings from inspected sources. Repeated reads, paraphrased reports, or repeated failures are not new progress. Two automatic continuation turns without evidence prompt bounded recovery; a third pauses with the unresolved next action. Waiting for you or a permission decision does not count as inactivity.

Checks become stale when their relevant files or requirements change. Repair and inactivity allowances persist across restart. Task Recovery & Restoration explains evidence, safe check retries, and selective file restoration.