/ax-audit

Multi-step agent task shows no progress

Agent runs a task that takes 30+ seconds. The UI shows nothing: no streaming, no step counter, no thinking indicator. User doesn't know if it's working, stuck, or crashed. Silent agents feel broken.

Scope: this rule audits what the user sees. If the server never emitted progress events in the first place, the finding belongs to rules-arch/comm-no-progress-visibility, and fixing the component cannot resolve it.

What goes wrong

User asks the agent to analyze a dataset. Three tool calls, API waits, synthesis, 45 seconds. The user sees a spinner or nothing. At 15 seconds they wonder if it's broken. At 30 they refresh.

Detection

Surfaces: agent-chat

Auditability: code-auditable

Static signals:

1. Find the components that call the agent (chat submit handlers, action panel triggers).
2. Check whether they subscribe to progress (onChunk, onToken, onProgress, onStatus, onData, useChat) and render what arrives, not just the final value.
3. Flag components that receive events but only render on completion: a handler that sets state no JSX reads is the same silence to the user. In AI SDK 7, a component that reads status only to disable the send button and renders message.parts only once status === "ready" is this finding; so is one that reads message.parts while the server writes status as transient parts, which arrive only through onData.

Concrete commands:

rg '(useChat|useCompletion|agent\.chat|agent\.run|streamText|generateText)' --type=ts -l src/components/ src/app/
rg '(onChunk|onToken|onProgress|onStatus|stream:\s*true)' --type=ts src/components/ src/app/
rg -n "status === ['\"]streaming|isStreaming|isLoading|onData" --type=ts src/components/ src/app/

False-positive guards:

• Skip files with // ax-audit-ignore:comm-no-progress-signal.
• Skip test and Storybook fixtures.
• Skip agent calls that reliably complete in under 2 seconds.

Fix

Render each event as it arrives instead of waiting for the final value. Name the current step in the user's words, not the tool's: "Searching for X..." then "Found 3 results, analyzing..." beats three identical spinners. A generic "Thinking..." held for 45 seconds is still a frozen UI.

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: release-blocker

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails):

async function onAsk(query: string) {
  const data = await fetch("/api/agent/research", {
    method: "POST", body: JSON.stringify({ query }),
  }).then((r) => r.json()); // 30-60s silence, no feedback
  setResult(data);
}

Applied (passes):

export function ResearchPanel() {
  const [steps, setSteps] = useState<string[]>([]);
  const { data, isStreaming } = useAgentStream("/api/agent/research", {
    onStatus: (s) => setSteps((prev) => [...prev, s]),
  });
  return <>
    {isStreaming && <ProgressList steps={steps} current={steps.at(-1)} />}
    {data && <Results data={data} />}
  </>;
}

Suppression

{/* ax-audit-ignore:comm-no-progress-signal, instant lookup, sub-second response */}
<QuickLookup />