Reading the agent activity feed
Agent work is surfaced as a sequence of actions — what the agent did, to what, and how it turned out — rather than as a transcript to be decoded. The design intent is three things in order: comprehension (what happened), confidence (is it going well), control (do I need to step in).
The unit to read is the outcome, not the explanation.
Why it matters to you
Supervising delegated work is the skill that determines whether an agent team is an asset or a liability, and it is different from reading a conversation. A transcript tells you what an agent said; an activity view tells you what it did. In Buzz today those can diverge sharply.
This matters more here than in most tools because of the characteristic failure mode: agents describing a task convincingly instead of performing it. Fluency is not evidence.
How to apply it
Ask "did the thing happen", not "does this sound right". A long articulate account with no completed action is the warning sign, not the reassurance.
Start from Home rather than from channels — it assembles what needs you, and Buzz will not interrupt you otherwise. See Notifications and the Home feed.
Open the activity view when something looks off, and read for the sequence of outcomes.
Choose deliberately between leaving it, steering once, and stopping. Steering works for an agent doing the wrong thing sensibly; it does not work for a loop. See Stop, steer or recover a runaway agent.
Set a supervision rhythm — daily during an active project — rather than relying on noticing.
Do not read presence as activity. The presence window is 180 seconds, so an "online" agent may have been gone for three minutes. Presence answers "was something there recently", not "is work happening".
The supervision surfaces are still settling between releases; the principles here hold either way, but exact click paths may differ in your build.
If you ignore this
A supervision habit built on reading text will miss the failure that matters, every time, because the text is the part that works. A habit built on checking effects catches it in the first cycle.
At scale this is the difference between an agent team that reduces your workload and one that adds a background worry to every delegated task.
Examples
A status report versus a delivery receipt. The first is written by the person you are checking on.
An agent reports having reviewed and updated eight files. The activity view shows two reads and no writes. Both are consistent with the message.
Judging an agent's week by scrolling the channel. The channel is where the agent's account of its work lives, which is precisely the thing under question.
Verified against Buzz v0.5.20 · Updated 2 Sep 2026