Getting started
How a job runs
The path from your message to a finished result: plan, run, approval gate, artifact, and the record it leaves.
Worth reading once. Most of what surprises people about Gini (why it pauses, why it asks, why it can keep working after you've closed your laptop) falls out of how a run is put together.
From your message to a result
You ask. In a channel Gini is in, by @mentioning it, in a thread it's already part of, or in a DM. That message starts a run.
Gini works out what you meant. It has the channel, what it knows about your company, your team's skills, and the tools you've connected. If the ask is ambiguous in a way that changes the work, it asks you now rather than guessing and burning twenty minutes.
It shows a plan. On anything beyond a quick lookup, you get the steps before it takes them. This is your cheapest chance to stop it: say "no, not that one" and it re-plans.
It runs on its own machine. A sandboxed cloud machine, holding only the tools this job needs, torn down when the job is done. Nothing runs on your laptop and nothing persists on that machine afterwards.
It stops before anything that reaches another person. Sending an email, submitting a form, spending money: the run parks and posts an approval card naming the action and its scope, and waits. See Approvals for exactly what stops and what doesn't.
It posts the result. The report, the file, the link to what changed. Facts come with source chips you can click. See Results and sources.
It writes down what it learnt. If the job produced a durable fact about your company, that goes to the wiki. If it produced a repeatable procedure that worked, Gini may propose a skill. Both are visible and both are yours to reject.
Why runs can take a while
A quick lookup comes back in seconds. A real job (read 200 tickets, cross-reference the CRM, write the summary) takes minutes, sometimes tens of minutes.
That's the machine doing the work rather than a model answering from memory, and it's the trade you're making. You can close Slack. The run continues and Gini posts to the thread when it's finished.
Watching a long run
The thread updates as it goes. You can also open app.ginicomputer.com and watch the run there, step by step, including what each tool returned.
What a run leaves behind
| What | Where it goes | How long it lives |
|---|---|---|
| The result | The Slack thread | As long as your Slack retention keeps it |
| The run record: steps, tools called, approvals | The web app | 90 days by default |
| Facts worth keeping | The company wiki | Until you delete them |
| Message content Gini wasn't asked to keep | Nowhere | Not stored |
Data handling covers retention properly, including how to change these windows on an Enterprise plan.
Runs that fail
They do. A tool times out, a connection expired, the ask turned out to be impossible.
When that happens Gini says so in the channel, tells you what it tried and where it stopped, and does not quietly retry a sensitive action. A failed run that had already sent an email will tell you the email went out. When Gini gets it wrong covers what to do next.