---
title: "Sessions"
url: "https://control.actana.ai/docs/panel/sessions"
description: "Real PTYs streamed to the browser: status buckets, the one-writer rule, and the VM shell escape hatch."
updated: 2026-09-01T09:03:13+00:00
---

The Panel labels a unit of harness work as a **Session**. In the product's own types that unit is a **Task** — a run of a Harness against a project's files. Only rendered strings say Session. The live conversation behind it (the PTY plus the Harness's own session id) is also called a session in the domain; you do not need both words at the keyboard.

What you type into is a real PTY on the Core, streamed to the browser over the panel-link. It is not a transcript view. Bytes go both ways.

## Status

Sessions split into three buckets you can scan from Fleet and from the grid:

| Bucket | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| **needs-input** | The Harness stopped to ask a question or grant a permission. |
| **running** | The Harness is working. |
| **finished** | The turn ended. |

Per-project counts use the same buckets, so a machine waiting on you is visible without opening it.

## Who may type

At most one connection may write into a session. Everyone else attached to it can read every byte and write none of them.

That exclusive write is a **session lock**, held by a core-link connection — the Panel as a whole, or an `actana session attach`, not a person. If another client already holds it, this tab is read-only.

Which of *your* Panel tabs types is separate: **session drive** is local to the Panel. Two tabs are one operator. The first pane that opens on a session nobody in this Panel is driving takes the keyboard; a later tab follows and may ask for it. The Core never hears about that.

You only need this: one writer, others read. A following tab is not the same as a session another client holds.

## VM shell

**New Terminal** opens a **VM shell session**: a free-form interactive shell on the Core's machine. It is not a Harness and it is not bound to a project folder. Same core-link auth; you open it on purpose. It is the SSH-equivalent escape hatch, rendered like a user terminal.

## See also

- [Using the Panel](/docs/panel)
- [Fleet](/docs/panel/fleet)
- [Projects](/docs/panel/projects)
- [Client nouns](/docs/cli/commands)