Swarm spreads the work of one message across sub-agents that run at the same time. The Mind starts them when it decides the work can be split; each agent works in its own chat, and their reports come back into the main conversation when they finish. For switching Swarm on for a message and the on-screen walkthrough of the tree, see Swarm agents.
Each agent appears as a node under the conversation or the agent that started it. A node shows the agent's name, its status, when it started or finished, the tokens its own chat has spent, a short summary of its result once it finishes, and the names of the artifacts it delivered.
The six statuses are Queued, Running, Waiting for you, Completed, Failed and Stopped. Queued, Running and Waiting for you are live statuses; the others are endings. An agent that needs an answer or an approval from you shows Waiting for you, and it stays live while it waits.
Stopping an agent also closes whatever it was waiting for from you.
When no agent in the tree is still live, one message arrives in the main conversation with their reports. It opens with "[Swarm]" and counts what came back, as in "[Swarm] 2 sub-agent(s) finished. Their reports follow:". Under it, each agent has a section headed by its name and its status.
Some steps need something only a person can give, such as access to data. Those requests always wait for your approval, even when the chat is set to apply other changes automatically. See Change approval in a builder chat.
When an agent waits for you, a notice names it and the tree marks it Waiting for you. Open its chat from the notice or from its node and decide there. A question it asks is answered like any other question from a Mind. See Questions from a Mind.
A conversation runs one turn at a time, and an agent works inside its own chat. While its turn runs, sending there is refused with "This conversation is already running a turn." Wait for the turn to end.
Yes. The agents work inside their own chats, so you can keep using the main conversation. Their report is delivered when no agent is still live; if the chat is busy at that moment, it arrives when the chat is free.
At most five live ones: queued, running and waiting for you all count. While five are live, a further spawn is refused with "A parent may have at most 5 live sub-agents at a time." A single spawn starts between 1 and 5 agents.
One turn of an agent is cut off after 150 minutes: "The swarm turn did not finish within 150 minutes." If an agent did not finish, its section in the report says how it ended.
For most steps they follow the chat's acceptance mode. A step that needs something only a person can give, such as access to data, always waits for your approval, even when the chat is set to apply other changes automatically. See Change approval in a builder chat.
Nothing is left hanging. A pending question is settled as skipped ("The user skipped this question"), and a waiting approval is declined with "The agent was stopped before a decision was made."
A stopped agent's section in the report says "Stopped before filing a report." An agent that waited longer than its session allows was closed automatically, and its section says it was reaped. You can resume it from the tree while its status is Stopped or Failed.
It counts the tokens spent in that agent's own chat, the conversation the agent works in.
The Mind stops starting agents. A spawn is refused with "Swarm agents are not enabled for this mind.", and a scheduled task that had Swarm saved runs without sub-agents. A Mind manager can switch it back on with Parallel sub-agents on the Mind's AI Config tab; see Choose models and AI behaviour.