Overseers — talking to one (part 4)

What it is

This is part 4 of the Overseers page, after part 2 and part 3. It is the last piece of running one: how you talk to it, and how you tell it when it kept something from you that you wanted.

Where to find it

The Overseers hub, on the Overseer's own Chat and Board tabs.

How it behaves

Asking one a question

Its Chat tab in the hub is its real session: type a question, get an answer. "What did I miss today?" / "Why is the billing project so noisy?" It has been answering your agents all along; this is your way in. Just us shows only your exchange with it; Everything it does shows the whole session, wake-ups and agent questions included. Swarms it proposes appear in the same tab as cards you approve or decline.

Why "Just us" is nearly empty compared to "Everything it does"

An Overseer's session is mostly machinery. Most of what is in there is the app talking to it — the wake-up prompt every fifteen minutes, the "here are the alert cards to judge" briefing, and the questions your other agents put to it — plus its replies to all of those. None of that is addressed to you, so Just us leaves it out. What is left is what the two of you actually said. On a busy Overseer that can be four messages out of a hundred and fifty, and that is the view working, not a bug.

Two things decide it, and neither is a guess:

• The app knows which turns it injected. A turn only counts as yours if you actually typed it. A briefing can never pass as your message, even one sent by a part of the app that forgets to label itself.
• The Overseer can quiet one of its own replies. When it answers you but the answer is just a routine status update — "done", "still watching" — it can tag that reply and it stays out of Just us. It decides; you never have to configure anything.

Nothing is ever deleted. A tagged reply is still in the session, still searchable, and shows in full under Everything it does. And the tag has limits the Overseer cannot talk its way past: it can only quiet its own answers, never anything you wrote; a reply that is asking you something always shows; and the answer to your most recent message always shows, so you are never left looking at your own question with silence under it.

Telling one it got it wrong

Any row on its Board tab where an alert was kept from you — silenced, merged, or still being held — carries an "I wanted this" button. Pressing it does three things:

1. Brings the alert back, so you get the thing you missed.
2. Writes the correction into that Overseer's notes, so it still knows tomorrow.
3. Tells the running Overseer immediately, so it applies today rather than waiting for its next restart — up to 24 hours away.

The confirmation says which of those actually happened. If the original alert was already gone, it tells you that rather than claiming everything worked.

The button doesn't appear on alerts that reached you normally — there'd be nothing to correct.

Related

• Overseers — the hub every Overseer is listed in.
• Overseers — running one (part 2) — waking up, copying one, and pointing it at sessions.
• Overseers — the work, the settings and the internals (part 3) — the work it hands out and its settings.