Sessions

A session is one interactive conversation with Co-Scientist. Co-Scientist preserves your conversation history, so you can resume earlier sessions to continue your work. This page covers how to start, continue, and exit sessions, and how to run non-interactively.

Start a session

Launch an interactive session:

seqera ai

Start with an initial query:

seqera ai "list my pipelines"

Set the approval mode for local commands at launch:

seqera ai --approval-mode full

See Command approval for the available modes.

Continue or resume a session

Continue your most recent session:

seqera ai -c

Continue with a follow-up question:

seqera ai -c "now run the pipeline with the test profile"

Resume a specific session by ID:

seqera ai -s <session-id>

Run in headless mode

Run Co-Scientist in headless mode for scripting and automation. Output is sent to stdout instead of the interactive TUI.

Run a query and pipe the output:

seqera ai --headless "list my pipelines"

Include thinking messages in the output:

seqera ai --headless --show-thinking "debug my pipeline"

Include tool calls in the output:

seqera ai --headless --show-tools "list my workflows"

note

Headless mode is also auto-detected when stdout is piped, for example seqera ai "query" | grep "result".

Session retention and limits

The Co-Scientist agent backend keeps session history for a fixed period and caps the number of sessions:

Setting	Default
CLI session history retention	14 days
Seqera Platform Co-Scientist conversation retention	180 days
Idle time before a session's in-memory state is released	48 hours
Sessions per user	100
Sessions per workspace	500

After 48 hours without activity, the backend releases a session's in-memory state. The backend keeps the conversation history, and you can still resume the session until it reaches the retention limit. After the retention limit, the backend deletes the session and you can no longer resume it.

Your Seqera Platform administrator can change these defaults in the agent backend configuration.

Interrupt a response

Press Esc to interrupt the current response. The CLI stops the run on the Co-Scientist backend as well as in your terminal. Interrupted work does not continue in the background.

Exit a session

• Type /exit, /quit, or /q
• Press Ctrl+C

Your conversation history is preserved, so you can resume later with seqera ai -c.

Learn more

• Modes: Work in build, plan, and goal modes
• Command approval: Control which commands run automatically
• Quickstart: Run your first Co-Scientist session
• Skills: Built-in skills, slash commands, and session limits