Workflows

Claude Code’s Workflow tool orchestrates many subagents from a script — fan out a review across dimensions, pipeline a migration over dozens of files, run a judge panel over competing designs. Claudette renders each run as a live tree in the chat transcript: phases, per-agent state, token and tool counts, and elapsed time.

What you see

A workflow appears in the transcript as a card, in place of the tool call that launched it.

Header — the workflow’s name (read from the script’s meta.name), how many agents have finished, total tokens, and a badge for any that failed. A progress rail underneath fills as agents complete, turning green on success or red if any agent errored.
Phase groups — agents are grouped under the phase that spawned them, in declaration order.
Agent rows — one per subagent, showing its state (○ queued, ◐ running, ● done, ✕ failed), model, token count, tool-call count, and elapsed time. The second line shows the agent’s latest tool activity, or its error if it failed.
Script — a collapsed disclosure at the bottom of the card holds the workflow script itself.

Rows carry extra badges where relevant: cached when a resumed run served an agent from its prior result instead of re-running it, retry N when an agent needed more than one attempt, and worktree or remote when an agent ran isolated.

The card is expanded by default. Collapsing it hides the agent tree but keeps the header and progress rail visible, so a collapsed run still shows its agent count, failures, and tokens at a glance. That holds both while the run is live and after the launching turn has finished, and your choice carries across that boundary — collapse a running workflow and it stays collapsed, in the same shape, once the turn ends.

The status pill

Workflows run in the background. The tool returns “launched in background” within a second, the agent finishes its turn, and the run keeps going for minutes — so the card is usually well above the fold by the time anything interesting happens.

A pill above the message composer keeps each in-flight run visible: workflow name, current phase, and agents completed. Click it to scroll its card back into view. Concurrent workflows each get their own pill.

The pill disappears when the run ends — whether it completed, failed, or was terminated. Terminated runs count: a workflow you stop, or one killed when its session is interrupted or reset, resolves the same way rather than leaving an indicator behind.

Persistence

A completed run’s tree is stored with the turn, so it renders the same after an app restart, in forked sessions, and when history is replayed from disk.

Because a workflow typically finishes long after its turn was saved, Claudette writes the final tree back to that turn when the completion notification arrives.

A workflow runs inside the Claude Code process that started it, so it does not survive that process going away — quitting Claudette, stopping the agent, or resetting the session ends the run. Claudette marks those runs stopped rather than leaving them mid-flight: any still marked running when Claudette starts belongs to a process that is gone, and is resolved at launch. Their cards keep the tree as of the last progress update before the process ended.

Limits

Claudette renders what Claude Code puts on the stream, which shapes what is and isn’t available:

log() output is not shown. Claude Code strips narrator lines before the progress stream leaves the CLI, so they never reach Claudette.
Runs can’t be controlled from Claudette. Pause, kill, retry, and skip live inside the Claude Code process and aren’t exposed over its stream protocol. Use /workflows in a Claude Code terminal for those.
Progress is throttled. Claude Code sends the full tree on state changes and at most every ten seconds otherwise. Elapsed times for running agents are interpolated locally so rows keep counting between updates.
Claude backends only. Codex Native sessions have no equivalent tool; the card never appears there.

Enabling workflows

Workflows are a Claude Code feature, configured in Claude Code rather than in Claudette:

Available on paid plans; not enabled by default on Pro.
Toggle with the Workflows setting in Claude Code’s /config.
CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_WORKFLOWS disables the tool entirely.
Claude Code’s Workflow keyword trigger setting controls whether the word “workflow” in a prompt starts one.

If workflows are unavailable in your Claude Code install, the tool is never offered to the agent and nothing changes in Claudette.

Task History — the Tasks panel, which tracks agent-declared checklists rather than runtime-spawned agents.
Parallel Agents — running independent agents across separate workspaces.