What do you recommend for checking what GPT-Dot is doing while you’re away, and does anyone else have trouble telling whether it kept working? I left it organizing my router setup notes while I went downstairs to switch the laundry. When I returned, the text on screen looked exactly as I’d left it. I expected to see more output by then, but I couldn’t tell whether it had stopped or was still working. My laptop was plugged in with the lid open.
If you’re judging progress only by the chat text, I’d ask for visible checkpoints before walking away: “Post the outline first, then each completed section, and tell me if you need input.” For your router notes, I’d request a partial draft rather than a single finished document. When you return, ask what it completed and to show that work, not just whether it’s still working. I’d treat an actual draft as more useful evidence than a reassuring status message. That’s what I’d try before setting up remote monitoring.
I’d test unattended first. I think it’s a good idea to do some trial runs while you’re there, to make sure it does what you want. If you can find a small task that takes some time to process, maybe try locking or sleeping the computer when you leave, and see if the task finishes. I wouldn’t try setting up remote monitoring unless you are sure that just leaving the computer alone won’t stop it.
I wouldn’t expect watching the screen from downstairs to tell me why a task stopped. I’d want to know whether it needs a decision from me. Otherwise I’ve just given myself a second screen to stare at, which feels like a questionable upgrade to “away.”
I’d tweak @matrixspark7531’s instruction to ask for input: tell it which questions can wait until you return. For organizing notes, I wouldn’t want it waiting for approval over section names or where to put an unlabeled paragraph. An unclear password or conflicting network setting is a different matter. My preference would be to leave those unresolved and continue organizing everything else.
For this task, I’d give it something like: “Work only from these notes. Put ambiguous items under ‘Needs review’ and keep going. Don’t guess missing settings, access the router, or change its configuration. If something prevents you from continuing at all, tell me exactly what you need from me.”
For checking while away, I’d favor a completion or blocked-task notification over a running commentary, if your setup supports those notifications. I’d test that the notification actually reaches your phone before relying on it. That would be my addition to @xavier’s trial run: deliberately give it something that requires your approval and see whether you hear about it. A successful task tests completion. I’d want the interruption path tested too.
When checking manually, my question would be “Are you waiting on anything from me?” rather than “Still working?” I’d still inspect the output afterward, but while downstairs I mainly want to know whether I need to intervene. I’m happy to postpone a debate about folder names until the laundry is done.
Asking a new chat if the job is done is not an effective status check. Unless it can interrogate the original task, it is asking to report on work it might have no access to. For my phone I’d have to find out whether I could reopen the conversation/task that I was previously running, before asking about status. A separate conversation with the same assistant is not what I would do for a status check.
That’s the caveat I’d put on @devdev4832’s suggestion to ask whether it’s waiting on you. Ask that in the original task, with whatever activity details your setup exposes. If there’s a task history, I’d check which job the status belongs to and when it last changed. “Completed” needs to refer to this attempt, rather than an earlier pass through the notes. I wouldn’t assume GPT-Dot offers that view without knowing how you’re running it.
The bigger nuisance is determining what to do when the status is unclear. I would resist simply resubmitting for the assignment altogether before figuring it out with certainty. Until one has clarified exactly what has transpired with the first go, a repeated attempt would simply create further questions as to which output to retain in the end. As for the router notes, my instruction would be to leave the file intact as the source, and to place the organized version in a separate, properly named draft in its stead if possible, so that one has an exact place to look without having to parse edits to one’s only copy.
So my preference would be access to the original task and its saved result, rather than a live view of the desktop. The checkpoints suggested by @matrixspark7531 help you judge the work, but I’d want those checkpoints to remain accessible after leaving and returning. If your setup gives you neither a retrievable result nor a way to inspect the original task, I’d treat unattended operation as unverified. A reassuring answer from another chat wouldn’t change that.
If GPT-Dot is running inside a browser tab rather than as a real background job, the whole monitoring question changes shape. A lot of these assistants quietly throttle or stall when the tab loses focus, and they won’t announce it. So you can come back to a chat that looks alive, scroll up, and realize it stopped three steps ago without ever saying so. That’s worth knowing before you build any checking routine on top of it.
@xavier’s trial run idea is the right instinct, but I’d stretch the test a bit. Don’t just confirm the task finishes when you lock the screen. Watch whether it pauses silently with no error and no completion. A clean stop is easy to catch. A frozen one that still looks busy is the real headache, and that’s the case your notifications won’t save you from, because nothing fired an event to notify about.
For the router notes specifically, I’d copy the file somewhere safe before you leave and treat the original as untouchable. Doesn’t matter how good the instructions are. If it half-reorganizes your only copy and then stalls, you’re now untangling a mess instead of reading a draft. Cheap insurance, takes ten seconds, and it means a stalled run costs you nothing.
For a notes-organizing task, I would expect that it ends and stops doing anything at some point, so I would not use ‘still busy’ to describe it. I’m not sure what’s the difference is between the two scenarios: that it stopped because it had done it’s job, or because it got only halfway through the notes. Either way, it would leave me with a nicely organized document that I don’t know what to do with next.
I like @matrixspark7531’s suggestion to ask for a partial draft, but I’d have trouble judging that draft without knowing how much of the original it covers. My preference would be to give the source notes simple labels and ask for a short coverage list at the end: which notes went into which sections, and which haven’t been included. Something like, “Account for every source note, even if you combine duplicates. List anything you leave out.” That gives me a specific thing to check instead of trying to decide whether the draft looks long enough.
On checking from downstairs: assuming I can open the saved output on my phone, for example, it would be good to know first what that coverage list says. It won’t show me that the task is currently running, and I wouldn’t trust the assistant’s own list either, but it could help me differentiate ‘there is a finished draft to review’ from ‘there is some output’. Rather check what is not done than watch the activity indicator, and that might be especially useful if I don’t understand what the latter is supposed to mean.
If this really only takes as long as a laundry cycle, you’re building infrastructure for a problem you might not have. Half the trouble here comes from treating a short notes cleanup like an overnight batch job. Sometimes the honest answer is that the task isn’t worth monitoring at all, and you just check the output when you’re back and redo it if it’s junk.
That said, @cosmiccache is right about the silent stall being the nasty case, and I’ll go further: for a notes job you often can’t tell a finished run from a frozen one by looking at the result, because both leave you a document that looks done. So forget the chat window as your signal. Watch the file itself.
If GPT-Dot writes to an actual file, the modification timestamp is the cheapest status check there is. Hasn’t changed in a few minutes? It either finished or died, and you go look either way. No notification plumbing to test, nothing to reach your phone, no second chat to interrogate. The clock tells you more than the assistant will. On a phone you can usually see the last-modified time without even opening the thing.
Where I’d push back a little is on the heavy coverage-list and label-everything setup people are describing. That’s solid for a big migration, but for one pile of router notes it’s more scaffolding than the job deserves. You’ll spend longer writing the instructions than reading the draft. I’d keep it blunt: copy the source somewhere it can’t touch, point it at the copy, tell it to stop and say so if anything’s genuinely missing, and leave.
The one thing I genuinely wouldn’t skip is @xavier’s trial while you’re sitting there, specifically the stall case, not the clean finish. Lock the screen, come back, and see if it quietly went to sleep. If it does that once with you watching, you know unattended is off the table for your setup and you can stop planning around it.