Wing Tips: Using the Tasks Tool with AI Agents in Wing Pro 12

Entering and Queueing Requests

To add a task, open the Tasks tool from the Tools menu if it isn't visible, and use the + button on its Plan tab, in either the Goals or the Tasks view.

A task you type starts as a Draft, so nothing runs it while it is half written. Click its Draft pill to mark it Ready when you're done, which tells the Tasks Manager (when it is on) that it can queue the task. To run a task yourself, queue it from its Q menu. While the Tasks Manager is on, the Q menu is hidden: right-click on the task and select one of your own queues from its Queue submenu instead.

Keeping the Plan Manageable

Once your plan holds more goals than you are working on, you can set some aside. Now, Later, and All, on the line below the Goals, Tasks, and Incoming views, choose which goals are shown. To set a goal aside, click the clock icon in its header. Its Ready tasks become Drafts, and the Tasks Manager leaves them alone until you make one Ready yourself or bring the goal back. Clicking the goal's clock again brings it back to Now.

Outline and Focus, at the right of the same line, set how goals open. In Outline, the default, each goal opens and closes on its own. In Focus, opening a goal closes the others, and double-clicking on any goal focuses on it. The Compact / Expanded button above them switches between showing the whole text of each task and a single line:

Shown above: The Goals view in Now and Outline, with one goal open.

Running Queued Tasks

Once a task is queued, it moves to the Execute tab of the Tasks tool. If the queue is active and has Auto-Advance enabled then it will start each queued task automatically. If not, use the play icon on the queue to start its next task. To stop a running task early, use its Cancel action. A task left interrupted offers Move to Review to keep what it has done so far, or Reset to return it to the Plan tab.

The Execute tab has two views. Queues shows your queues at the top and the selected queue's tasks below. Up Next shows what runs next in every queue, followed by the Ready tasks that no queue holds yet, and points out tasks the Tasks Manager has just queued. Click a queue's name there to show its session in the AI Agent tool:

Shown above: Up Next with two queues running, a task the Tasks Manager just queued, and a Ready task that no queue holds yet.

Queueing makes it easy to batch related work and walk away, for example with a Bug Fixes queue for small fixes as you think of them and other queues for larger work. Be mindful of agents changing the same code at once, and ask an agent to keep to specific files or directories when that helps. Wing tracks which files each task changes, so you can commit the work of different queues separately.

Even when the Tasks tool isn't visible, the agent status area at the right end of the main toolbar shows whether agents are running, how many queues are waiting for your input, and a button that jumps to changes ready for review.

After a task is completed, it transitions to the Review tab, from which you can review and accept or reject edits that were made. That and the History tab are covered in a later Wing Tip.

Letting the Tasks Manager Do the Queueing

Once you are running more than a few tasks, deciding which ones can run at the same time, watching queues, and looking through sessions for questions becomes work in itself. The Tasks Manager is an agent that can do this for you. Turn it on from the Options menu or the Turn On button at the top of the Execute tab, write your tasks, and mark them Ready. The Manager creates its own queues, runs what can safely run side by side, and collects every agent's questions on the Questions tab.

With the Manager on, tasks run autonomously: each works as far as it can and ends with a report of what it did, the judgement calls it made, and any questions it still has. Many people work with a single agent for a while before turning on the Manager, and others use it from the start; it's up to you. Autonomous development with the Manager is covered in detail in the next Wing Tip.

Triaging What Agents Found

Agents often notice problems outside the task they are working on, and the Tasks Manager proposes follow-up work as it goes. These arrive as Drafts on the Plan tab, and its Incoming view lists the ones you haven't looked at yet, grouped by goal, with their number shown beside Incoming. Seen leaves a task as a Draft in its goal, Dismiss deletes it, and clicking its pill makes it Ready. From the keyboard, J and K move between tasks, and R, S, and D make the selected task Ready, mark it seen, or dismiss it:

Shown above: The Incoming view in Compact rows, with a problem an agent found and a test the Tasks Manager proposed.

On the Plan and Execute tabs, tasks you didn't write carry a chip saying where they came from: Found, Manager, Fix, or Check. Tasks that agents found or proposed also have a colored bar down their left edge. Hover over a chip to see the task's origin, or click it to show the agent session that filed the task.

Following Up Within a Task

While a task is running, or after it completes, you can send follow-up requests within the same agent session. The agent has the full context of what came before, so you don't need to re-explain. Typical follow-ups:

Shown above: Typing a follow-up in the AI Agent tool to continue the same session -- here, asking the agent to update the documentation for the change it just made.

Run Mode and Context

Before you queue a task, its Q menu chooses its queue and whether it starts a new agent session or reuses the queue's session. A new session for each task tends to save on tokens. Reuse the session when a series of tasks benefits from knowing what came before.

A new session also sets the run mode. Plan has the agent explore the code and write a plan without making any edits, which you can revise before approving it. Use it for larger or riskier changes, for tracking down a difficult bug, and for safely reading code that another task is changing. Ask For Approval asks before acting, except for what you have pre-approved on the AI Agent tab of Project Properties (by default, edits inside the project). Auto-Approve, the default, lets the agent's own judgement decide what to ask about. The Q menu lists only the modes the queue's agent supports, and Wing warns before starting a task in a mode that the agent handles more broadly than you might expect.

While the Tasks Manager is on, the Q menu is hidden, because the Manager chooses each task's queue, session, and run mode. To have a task researched and planned before it is carried out in any case, right-click on it and check Research First.

When reusing a session, Full Context keeps the whole conversation, and Compact Context, for agents that can compact, summarizes it first. Compacting consumes tokens itself, so it makes sense only in longer series of related tasks:

Shown above: Choosing Plan from a task's Q menu, so the agent writes a plan before it changes any code.

Further Reading

Wing's AI agent integration has a lot of features, but you don't need to understand all of them to get started. When in doubt, ask the agent!

See also Autonomous Development with AI Agents, and The Tasks Tool and AI Agent-Assisted Development in Wing's documentation.

That's it for now! Next time we'll look at autonomous development, where the Tasks Manager runs your agents for you.

As always, please don't hesitate to email support@wingware.com if you run into problems or have any questions.