Work

Work is Arro doing a task for you instead of walking you through it. It happens three ways: as a one-off background task, as a saved workflow it learned by watching you, or on a schedule you set.

​

Background tasks

Ask Arro for something that needs doing and it runs in the background while you keep working. A background task can drive your real browser through a whole flow, work across several apps, run shell commands, and read, write, and edit files on your computer. For a quick research task, set a source limit and specify the questions to answer. Home’s Research a topic suggestion asks for your topic, then reads at most 2 Wikipedia articles and writes a PDF report file. A task reads text files, images, PDFs and notebooks directly, and a long PDF a range of pages at a time. It opens Word, Excel and PowerPoint files with code, which reads their text, tables and notes but not how they look. For the look, give it a PDF export. A task can read a file you attached in Home’s chat without asking first. What Arro reads covers the other files a task opens. Arro may ask a question or two before a bigger task starts, like which vendors to compare, so the task has what it needs from the beginning. The task streams its progress to the dynamic dock and tells you when it lands. When the task was finding something out, like reading your messages or checking prices, Arro tells you what it found and answers follow-up questions from it, and the task’s page in Tasks shows the same result under its summary. You step in only when it needs you, most often to sign in to a site or clear a CAPTCHA or two-factor prompt, or to answer a question only you can, like which spreadsheet to use. For a sign-in, you take the task’s page over, do the step, and hand it back. When it produces something, its card gives you an Open button, and the finished task lists the files it made for you in Creations. The raw material it collected on the way, like the pages it downloaded to read, is working scratch and is cleared when the task ends.

​

Asking for more

Ask for more on a finished task, like “do the same for March”, and Arro picks it up where it left off. The follow-up starts from everything the earlier task did and found, so nothing is redone. It shows in the dock and in Tasks as its own task, with its own name. The earlier task’s browser closed when it finished, so a follow-up reopens any page it needs.

​

Stopping a task

Stop a task with the cancel button on its card in the dock, or ask Arro, for example “stop that task” or “stop everything”. A stopped task keeps the work it had done so far. Ask Arro to pick it back up later, and it continues from that work as a new task.

​

Several agents on one task

When a task splits cleanly into parts that don’t depend on each other, a background task can put a separate agent on each part and run them at the same time, then pull the results together. Research spread over several sources is the common case. Up to four agents work at a time. A workflow run, including one working a task board card, can split its work the same way. It stays a single card in the dock, which shows how many agents are on it rather than one card each. To see them individually, open the task and look under Sub-tasks. Agents never ask you anything themselves. Anything only you can do goes through the main task. Each agent has an hour. One still running then is stopped, and the main task gets the work it had done. The main task does not finish while any of its agents are still working. Anything outside your allowed sites and folders is checked before it happens. By default a safety check judges it, so the task keeps moving and declines anything unsafe. Switch to Manually approve in the dock to decide each one yourself. Some locations are always off-limits either way, including credential stores and files whose only purpose is to hold a secret. See Allowed folders.

​

Watch once, then replay

For work you do again and again, Arro can watch you do it one time and turn it into a repeatable workflow. Start a replay from the workspace, or ask Arro by name: “run my invoice processing workflow.” A manual replay runs once and asks you for required inputs. It leaves the workflow’s task board queue untouched. See workflow execution modes and running many tasks at once.

​

Related