Working With Your Agent
Example conversations — drafting a phase, checking project health, booking resources, recording actuals — and what to expect on your screen.
Working With Your Agent
You don't need to learn tool names or commands — describe what you want in your own words. These examples show what a request looks like, what the agent does, and what you'll see, so you know what "normal" looks like.
Example 1: Draft a Phase
You: Add a "Roofing" phase to Plan A after Framing — membrane, insulation, and tiling, two days each, one after the other.
What the agent does: creates the parent task and its three subtasks in your open plan, wires finish-to-start dependencies between them, and lets YAPL's scheduler place the dates and renumber the WBS codes.
What you see: the moment the first edit lands, your plan forks an unpublished draft (the Draft badge appears) and the new tasks show up in your task list, WBS-numbered, with the dependency lines drawn. Your published plan hasn't changed. The agent typically ends with a summary like:
Added phase "Roofing" (WBS 4) with 3 subtasks, linked in sequence. The draft now shows 4 added tasks — review and publish when ready.
You stay in control of publishing: review the diff, then publish yourself or tell the agent to publish and confirm when it asks. If anything's wrong, "undo that" works — or discard the whole draft.
Example 2: Ask How the Project Is Doing
You: How is the Riverside project doing? Are we over budget?
What the agent does: reads the project's live metrics — progress, budget usage, task and milestone rollups, and earned-value figures if cost data exists.
What you see: no change in YAPL at all (it's a read), and an answer in plain words, for example:
Riverside is 63% complete with 2 of 5 milestones done and no overdue tasks. Budget: 4,100 spent — earned value is running ahead of spend (CPI 1.29), so you're currently under budget for the work performed.
Reads work from anywhere — you don't need a YAPL tab open for questions about published plans.
Example 3: Book a Resource
You: Put 65 cubic meters of C25 concrete on the Concrete Pour task.
What the agent does: searches your resource pool for "C25", finds Ready Mix Concrete C25 at $95/m³, and books 65 units on the task — the engine computes the cost from the resource's current rate.
What you see: the assignment appears on the task in your draft, and the agent reports the engine's own math:
Assigned "Ready Mix Concrete C25" to Concrete Pour at 65 units — planned cost $6,175.
For people and equipment, allocation works in units of time: 1 means full-time, 0.5 half-time. The agent knows the difference from each resource's rate type.
Example 4: Record Actual Work
You: We used all 65 cubes on the pour today — record it.
What the agent does: records 65 as actual work on that assignment; the engine computes the actual cost from the stored rate.
What you see: actuals appear on the assignment, and your cost dashboard's earned-value figures now include real spend (ACWP) — the same numbers your agent can read back to you, drafts included:
Recorded 65 units of actual work — actual cost $6,175. Your draft's cost performance index is now 1.05.
Example 5: Navigate
You: Take me to the resources page.
Your open YAPL tab navigates there. The agent waits until the page has actually loaded before confirming — useful when you want it to walk you through something on screen.
The Working Rhythm
- Keep the plan open and on screen for editing sessions. Draft edits happen in your browser tab; if you've navigated elsewhere, the agent will ask you (or offer) to open the plan first. Reads don't need this.
- Watch your screen. Edits appear live as the agent works — the "agent is editing" indicator shows while it's driving.
- You publish, not the agent. Publishing is a deliberate step. If the live plan changed while your draft was open (say, a teammate updated a task from Slack), YAPL's normal review dialog appears and the agent stops and asks rather than merging anything on its own.
- Everything is reversible before publish. Undo, redo, and discarding the draft all work exactly as if you'd made the edits yourself.
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