Dispatching & scheduling

How agents actually run.

Four ways an agent runs in Qalatra:

1. Task assignment

Put an agent name in a task: Write weekly retro &weekly-review. Select the task, press R. The agent runs against that task; its stdout streams into the task's detail panel.

2. Manual dispatch

Open the agent picker from the menu bar, pick an agent, optionally supply input, and run it. Output streams into a dispatch panel.

3. Scheduled

Any agent with a schedule: in its config runs on that cron. Qalatra uses your local timezone. See the Dispatch view for the live schedule.

4. Programmatic

Other agents can trigger an agent via mcp:dispatch_agent. Useful for chains — a morning-briefing agent that dispatches a doc-cleanup agent as one of its recommendations.

Queue & concurrency

Up to 3 agents run concurrently by default (configurable). Excess dispatches queue. See queue state in the status bar: 2/3 running · 4 queued.

Cancellation

Select the running task and cancel it from the detail panel, or call mcp:agent_cancel. Qalatra sends SIGTERM, then SIGKILL after 10s.

Output handling

Configured per-agent:

• task_notes — appended to the triggering task's notes field
• append_to_today — appended to today's daily note under ## agent
• file:./logs — written to a file relative to the agent folder
• discard — exit code only