Working While You're Away

LouEllen does not need you watching. Long jobs keep running after you close the tab, and when a job cannot go further without you, it stops and asks rather than guessing.

Closing the tab does not stop the work

Close the tab, shut the laptop, lose your wifi: the work carries on. Searches finish, rows get written, and the result is in the chat when you come back. Closing the tab is not a cancel, though. If you leave because the answer is heading the wrong way, it still gets finished, and it still counts against your plan. To stop it, stop it.

Steering it without stopping it

You do not have to wait for the job to finish before you say something. Type into the message box while LouEllen is working and your message is queued: it steers the job already under way rather than starting a new one. Files queue the same way, so you can hand over a document mid-job.

That is almost always better than stopping. "Skip anything outside Pennsylvania" lands mid-task and saves the run.

How to actually stop it

While LouEllen is working, the send button turns into a red Stop button whenever your message box is empty; Esc does the same. It is a "finish this step" stop rather than a kill switch: the work stops cleanly rather than halfway through saving a row, and everything already written stays.

Anything you queued that never got picked up comes back into your message box as editable text, files re-attached, and nothing sends. You pressed Stop because the job went sideways, and those messages were written assuming it had not.

When LouEllen needs something from you

Some work needs a person: a login, a decision, a number only your finance director has. The job stops and asks rather than inventing one, and waiting costs you nothing. It reaches you in one of four places.

In the chat. The job pauses with a note on what's needed, then carries on once you answer. If you never answer it eventually continues on best judgment and says what was assumed.

By email. LouEllen has a dedicated address, and for scheduled work usually writes to you there, because nobody is in the app at 6am. Reply as you would to a colleague, attachments and all. Only replies from your organization are accepted.

By handing you a browser. When a sign-in or a "prove you are human" check comes up, you get handed LouEllen's own browser. When the Agent Hands You Its Computer covers that.

In a scheduled task's run history. A run that needs you is marked Waiting, with a box to reply in. Sending from there wakes it immediately.

One trap worth knowing

If you are handed a browser and answer in the chat instead of opening the link, the link stops working and the paused job closes.

A browser you never opened is no use, so the handoff is retired rather than left hanging. Nothing you said is lost: the job picks up from your message and starts that step again without the sign-in, so expect to be handed the browser a second time. If you want the browser used, open the link.

How you know LouEllen finished

There are no push notifications. What you get is the dot on the chat in the sidebar:

  • A grey pulsing dot: work is happening in that chat right now. You can close the tab.
  • A solid blue dot: that chat's last job ended since you last looked. Opening the chat clears it.

Be careful with blue: it means "something happened here", not "it worked". A job that failed lights it the same way, deliberately, because a failure is the one you most need to open.

Scheduled work also emails you its result. A chat you walked away from just finishes, and the dot is how you find out.

Running more than one thing at once

You can have several chats working at once: a funder search in one, a draft in another. Each keeps its own dot, so you can see which are still going.