Task History
Agents often rewrite their task list as work shifts. Workbench keeps the latest checklist visible while preserving earlier runs in the workspace’s Tasks tab.
Task tool alignment
Section titled “Task tool alignment”Task history aligns with Claude Code’s task tool family: TaskCreate, TaskGet, TaskList, TaskUpdate, and TaskStop. When an agent creates or updates tasks through these tools, the changes are reflected in the Tasks sidebar in real time. Codex plan updates (update_plan) are also ingested into the same task UI.
Cross-session archive
Section titled “Cross-session archive”Task history persists across sessions and workspace switches. Closing Workbench and reopening it, or switching between workspaces, preserves the full task timeline. The history is derived from saved conversation and tool activity data, so it survives app restarts as long as the underlying chat history is intact. Clearing, deleting, or rolling back a chat session’s history also removes the derived task entries for that session.
Current Tasks
Section titled “Current Tasks”Open the right sidebar and choose Tasks. The Current section shows the selected chat session’s active task list, including status updates from Claude’s task and todo tools and Codex’s update_plan snapshots. When Codex includes a plan explanation, Workbench shows it above the checklist.
The tab badge counts every task the panel would surface — the active checklist plus any subagent buckets plus every task across archived history runs — so a workspace with older task lists still signals that there is task context to review.
Auto-scroll and following the active task
Section titled “Auto-scroll and following the active task”The Tasks sidebar auto-scrolls to keep the currently-active task visible — the task that is in_progress, or the next pending one if none is in progress. When the agent moves on, the list follows the new active task with a smooth scroll so you never have to chase active work down a long list.
Auto-follow yields the moment you scroll the list yourself — wheel, trackpad, scrollbar, or keyboard. The list then stays exactly where you put it even as new task transitions arrive, so you can read History without being pulled away. A Jump to current pill appears at the bottom of the list whenever the active task is off-screen; click it to scroll back to the active task and re-enable auto-follow.
Like every other scroll surface in Workbench, the Tasks list does not elastic-bounce at its top and bottom edges.
Subagent Tasks
Section titled “Subagent Tasks”When the main agent spawns subagents (via Claude Code’s TaskCreate / agent-teams flow), each subagent’s own task list renders in its own section above History, labeled with the subagent’s name. The main agent’s checklist stays in Current; subagent buckets are kept separate so the two never collide. Once a subagent finishes (status leaves running), its bucket is archived into History under the owning session.
Subagent labels are derived from the agent’s description field and capped at one line / 80 characters so long spawn prompts don’t blow up the layout. Hover the label to see the full single-line collapse of the original description.
Sibling Sessions
Section titled “Sibling Sessions”TeamCreate teammates run as sibling chat sessions in the same workspace. While a teammate’s agent is still running, that session’s live tasks (and its own subagents) appear as a dedicated lane in the Tasks panel — distinguished from Current by the session name and a pulsing live dot. Only after the teammate goes idle do its leftover tasks graduate into History under the session’s name.
The right sidebar remembers which tab (Files, Changes, or Tasks) you last selected for each workspace. Switching to a different workspace and back leaves your tab choice intact — every workspace returns to exactly where you left it. On a brand-new workspace, the tab defaults to Files; it auto-switches to Tasks the first time live tasks appear so you don’t have to hunt for the tab. Once you’ve explicitly chosen a tab for that workspace (or the auto-switch has fired), the choice is locked in for the session and no further auto-switches occur. Restarting the app resets all workspaces to Files.
Historical Runs
Section titled “Historical Runs”When Claude replaces a checklist with a materially different one, Workbench moves the previous checklist into History. Codex plan updates are also full snapshots, but status-only updates to the same step list stay in Current so normal progress does not flood history; a materially different update_plan checklist archives the previous plan run. Runs are grouped by chat session and start collapsed so the current work stays easy to scan.
Each run header shows the run number and completion count. Expand a run to see the final saved checklist snapshot, including completed and pending items. Archived chat sessions are included and labeled so long-running workspace history stays available even after you clean up old tabs.
Task history is derived from the saved conversation and tool activity for the workspace — see Cross-session archive above for persistence details.
Original source: utensils.io/claudette