Ordered by how often it happens, not by severity.

The phone cannot see my Mac

In order:

1. Is the Mac app running? It is a menu bar app and it is easy to have quit it. Nothing works without it.
2. Is the Mac awake? A sleeping Mac is an absent Mac.
3. Re-pair. Pairing is cheap. Scan the QR again.

For the very first pairing, both devices need to be on the same network. After that, anywhere.

A job will not start

“No credentials” or an auth error. The agent you picked has no key. Add one in Settings on the Mac, or pick a different agent.

It sat for several minutes. That is a one time image build for a kind of box you have not used before. The next job on that box starts in about a second.

“Low disk.” Operator refuses to build a large image rather than filling your drive. Free some space and launch again. The Mac app can tell you what is actually large.

An approval never arrived

• Notifications not allowed. Check the phone’s settings for Operator.
• Check Home anyway. The card is always there with a badge on the tab, even when the push did not land. Nothing is lost, only the nudge.

If you are on a TestFlight build and pushes never arrive at all, that is a known build configuration issue rather than something wrong with your setup.

The agent did something I did not want

Three places to look, in this order:

1. Memory. It may have learned a preference you no longer want. Every fact is readable, and deleting the offending one fixes it permanently.
2. The skill. A staged skill may be telling it to work that way. Skills are Markdown, so you can read exactly what it was told.
3. Policy. If it did something you expected to be asked about, the policy rule for that action is probably set to auto approve.

A job finished but produced nothing

Open the session and read the run history rather than the final message. Agents sometimes report success on a step that failed earlier. The history shows where it actually went wrong, and the terminal lets you look at the box yourself.

The worker is confused

Stop it and start another on the same session. Workers are disposable and the session keeps everything. This is almost always faster than arguing with a confused agent.

I quit the app and everything stopped

Expected. Running workers stop when the Mac app quits. Sessions are durable, so nothing is lost, and you can start fresh work on any of them when you come back.

Terminals are the exception: those survive.

Something is slow

• First run on a new box: the image build. Once.
• Every run slow: a local model too big for the machine, or a very long context. Try a smaller model.
• The phone feels behind: it is showing you a Mac that is busy. The session view catches up.

Still stuck

Every session carries its full history and audit log. When reporting a problem, the session is the thing to describe: what job, what agent, and what the last few steps of the run history say.