Run and monitor

Running a workflow

Two ways:

• Click the Run button on the workflow's control bar (also available from the World View rail and per-workflow frame controls).
• Click an individual agent's play icon to run just that agent on its own.

Clicking Run first checks the basics — a provider is configured, the workflow is saved, and it has at least one agent — then starts the run immediately with the workflow's saved configuration.

If you'd like to compose input for each run first, turn on the Input chip next to the workflow's name. With it on, Run opens the pre-run launcher: a panel pinned to the left of your workflow where you can type an instruction for the run, attach files, accept suggested context, and pull in connected data sources. Click Send to start the run.

The launcher is non-blocking: you can keep panning the canvas and clicking agents while it's open. Escape or the × closes it, and turning the Input chip off dismisses it too.

The Execution Modal

Once a run starts, the modal shows live status. Top section: overall progress and run cost.

Below that: one card per agent, grouped by wave. Each card shows:

• Status badge: Waiting / Running / Completed / Failed / Blocked / Skipped / Stopped.
• Streaming output preview (the agent's response as it's generated).
• Tool calls in flight, with the tool name and arguments.
• Wall-clock time so far.
• The agent's resolved provider + model.

Click any agent card to expand it for full output and full tool-call history.

The modal also shows:

• Current wave indicator at the top.
• Run cost so far (per provider).
• A banner when agents are waiting on you — click it to jump to the agent that needs an answer. The actual permission and approval prompts appear on the waiting agent's card on the canvas, not in this modal.

The same statuses show as badges on the agent cards on the canvas. Blocked (amber) means the agent stopped and reported what it needs to continue — a graceful stop, not a crash. Hover the badge to read what it asked for.

Stop, pause, resume

Three buttons in the modal:

Button	Behavior
Stop	Hard stop. All running agents are cancelled; the run ends. Use for true emergencies.
Pause	After each agent's current tool call finishes, the orchestrator pauses. Resume picks up where you left off.
Resume	Continue from a paused state.

The Execution Modal can be closed with Escape: the run continues in the background. To reopen, click the status indicator in the status bar.

Approval modes and permission prompts

When Cerevisor asks for permission is controlled by the approval mode — a three-position switch you'll find in Settings and in the chat builder's "Permission posture" strip (a workflow can also pin its own mode):

Mode	Behavior
Oversight	Every tool call — including safe reads — asks for your approval. Best when you're new to running agents or the workflow touches sensitive files.
Auto (default)	Reads, searches, writes, edits, and safe commands run automatically; consequential actions (deleting files, sending anything, untrusted integrations) ask first.
Hands-free	Never asks. Agents start immediately. Needs a one-time confirmation to switch on; the capability limits in Settings (files, bash, web, git) are still enforced.

When a prompt does appear, it shows up on the asking agent's card. It explains in plain language what will happen, why it's asking (e.g. "Auto mode checks consequential actions before they run"), and shows the workflow's policy at a glance. Options:

Button	Scope
Approve once	This single call.
Always allow [tool]	Every call of this tool for the rest of this run.
Approve all N pending	When several agents are waiting on the same kind of action, approve the whole batch at once.
Deny	Returns an error to the agent.

Permission prompts pause only the agent that asked, other agents in the same wave continue running.

Approval gates

If a connection has flow type Approval Gate, the workflow pauses when it reaches the gate. An approval card appears on the waiting agent, showing:

• The upstream agent's output preview.
• The approval prompt you wrote on the connection.
• The downstream agent that's waiting.

Click Approve to proceed or Reject to skip the downstream agent (the rest of the workflow continues). If you don't respond within the timeout (5 minutes by default), the gate counts as rejected rather than stalling the run forever.

Ask-user prompts

If an agent calls the ask_user tool, a question panel appears on that agent's card. It shows the question and either a list of choice buttons or a free-form text input.

The agent pauses until you respond. Other agents (in the same or other waves) continue running.

Run cost

The status bar shows running cost. The Execution Modal breaks it down per provider, per agent. Costs come from the provider's reported usage:

• Anthropic: reported tokens × per-model pricing.
• OpenAI-compatible: reported tokens × pricing if your provider returns it (Ollama returns no cost; local = always $0).
• Codex CLI: always $0 (subscription billing).
• Cursor Agent: always $0 (subscription billing).

After a run, the full cost breakdown is saved to the audit log.

Audit log

Every run writes an NDJSON file to ~/.cerevisor/audit-logs/<session-id>.ndjson. The log contains:

• Every event the orchestrator emitted.
• Every tool call (name, arguments, result).
• Every permission decision.
• Every model call (provider, model, tokens, cost).
• Errors with stack traces.

You can open these files in any text editor. They're the truth of what happened.

Replaying and partial re-runs

A .cerevisor file is the workflow definition. Re-opening it and pressing Run re-runs from scratch.

For partial re-runs after a completed run:

• Resume from this agent — on a finished agent (in its log window, or the button on the card), re-runs that agent and everything downstream of it while keeping every other agent's output from the last run. A wave header has the same action for a whole wave. By default a confirmation preview opens first; a per-workflow setting can skip it.
• Steer and re-run one agent — open a finished agent's log window and type in its chat box. Your message is treated as the latest instruction and just that agent re-runs with it (the canvas configuration itself is not changed).

Crash recovery

If Cerevisor crashes or is force-closed mid-run:

• On next launch, Cerevisor finds the interrupted run and opens the Recovered interrupted work dialog.
• All saved progress is restored and visible again — completed agents keep their output, turn counts, and cost. Interrupted agents are left stopped; nothing spends or acts until you say so.
• For each interrupted agent you can click Resume agent to re-run just that agent (open its workflow first if it isn't active).
• View recovered work opens the run view so you can inspect what finished. Discard deletes the recovered session.

Background runs

You don't have to keep the Execution Modal open. Close it (Esc) and the run continues. The status bar shows a live indicator with the current wave. Reopen the modal any time to see live state.

Cloud runs (Cursor only)

If you set the workflow's run mode to cloud and use the Cursor Agent provider, the run executes on Cursor's cloud VMs. Cloud runs survive Cerevisor restarts. Manage them via the Cloud Sessions modal (title bar icon). See Cursor cloud runs.