#Alerts

A short, prominent notice that surfaces the one thing that needs your attention right now.

#Overview

An alert is the format Arachne uses when something needs you — not a full report or a table of data, but a single clear signal you should not miss. It is deliberately brief and visually prominent so it stands out from ordinary output and reaches you quickly.

Alerts matter because long-running work does not always go to plan, and not everything can be carried through without you. When Arachne hits a moment that needs your awareness or your decision, an alert is how it tells you — directly, without burying the message in the rest of the result.

#What you can do

With an alert, you can:

  • See at a glance when Arachne needs your attention, your input, or your approval.
  • Get a clear, short statement of what happened and what it means.
  • Step away from a long task and trust that anything important will surface as an alert rather than being lost in a stream of output.
  • Act on the alert immediately — give an answer, grant permission, or adjust the task — and let the work continue.
Note

Arachne chooses the alert format automatically when the situation calls for a prominent notice. You do not have to ask for it. As with any result, you can also ask for a different format if you would rather see the same information another way.

#How to use it

  1. Watch for an alert while Arachne works. It is the short, prominent notice that stands apart from the normal flow of output.
  2. Read what it says. An alert is brief on purpose — it names what happened and what it needs from you.
  3. Decide what to do. Depending on the alert, you might answer a question, approve a pending action, change the permission level, or stop the task.
  4. Respond, and the work resumes from where it paused.
Tip

If you have set a lower permission level — Ask before acting or Plan first — Arachne will pause and surface what it wants to do so you can approve it. Turning on notifications means you can step away from a running task and still be told the moment an alert needs you.

#Examples

What you ask:

text
Sign me up for the workshop on this page and let me know if anything needs a decision.

What you see: Arachne moves through the registration flow, then raises an alert: the form is asking which of two session times you want before it can finish. You pick one, and Arachne completes the sign-up.

What you ask:

text
Keep gathering quotes from these suppliers and tell me if a price jumps.

What you see: Arachne works through the suppliers and, when one quote comes back far higher than the rest, raises an alert calling out the outlier so you can decide whether to include it — instead of quietly folding it into the results.

#Tips

  • Treat an alert as the signal that the rest of the output is not the whole story — it is the part that needs you now.
  • Turn on notifications so a long, unattended task can reach you with an alert the moment it needs a decision.
  • When you want to be told about specific conditions, say so in your request ("let me know if anything looks off"), and Arachne can raise an alert when they occur.
  • Stopping always works immediately — if an alert tells you something has gone wrong, you can halt the task at once rather than letting it continue.