How do you know if an agent is still running if there’s no “in progress” indicat
The question appeared on April 11th in the ChatGPT community, plain and unadorned: how do you know if an agent is still running when there's no indicator telling you it is? No spinner. No progress bar. No blinking cursor suggesting the machine is still thinking. Just a static interface and the slow, uncomfortable arithmetic of uncertainty — is this still working, or did it stop three minutes ago and nobody told me? The thread that followed revealed the question wasn't rhetorical. Others had sat in the same silence. Some had waited too long, some not long enough, and the thread accumulated the particular texture of a problem that people recognise the moment someone else names it. What's notable is the timing: as AI agents are being positioned as autonomous, capable tools that can run complex multi-step tasks, the basic feedback loop — the one that tells a human whether anything is actually happening — appears to have been left largely undesigned.
If confirmed as a widespread pattern, here is what this means. The gap isn't cosmetic. Feedback indicators are infrastructure — they're the mechanism by which humans calibrate trust in a system over time. When a tool gives you nothing, you don't learn to trust it; you learn to suspect it. Agents that run silently are agents that will be interrupted, restarted, and abandoned in the middle of consequential work, which means errors, duplicated actions, and the kind of unpredictable outputs that quietly undermine confidence in the entire category. Enterprise users especially — those evaluating whether to integrate agents into real workflows — will clock this absence immediately. The product teams building these tools tend to optimise for the moment of output, the impressive answer at the end. The unglamorous middle, the waiting, the uncertainty, gets designed last. That sequencing has a cost.
Watch for design updates from OpenAI or third-party agent interfaces that introduce persistent status indicators or activity signals — and for any community documentation of tasks that silently failed or silently completed while users were left guessing which.
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>I run a small fleet of local LLMs for my startup. We use them to automate customer support workflows nothing crazy, just routing queries,
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>we run an agent thing in production and we use langfuse for traces.</p> <p>last month our agent started refusing requests it should have
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1s439q8/why_does_my_agent_keep_asking_the_same_question/"> <img alt="Why does my agent keep asking the same
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>keeping it short, i was annoyed at my own AI workflow. same grunt work with prompts multiple times a day so i built a small wrapper around GPT
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1tgak8y/new_agent_mode/"> <img alt="New Agent Mode"
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Cursor dropped their new product yesterday and its not a code editor anymore. its an agent orchestration console that happens to have an editor
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1tjjfkz/agent_failed/"> <img alt="Agent Failed"
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Hi all,</p> <p>I have am a paid Chat GPT Plus subscriber. I have never used Agent Mode. I am looking to try it. However, I can not see it
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