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A run answers three questions at three different times: what will happen? (before), what is happening? (during), what happened? (after). One command each, all offline-friendly — every frame below is real output from this workflow:
standup-digest.nika.yaml
nika: v1
workflow: standup-digest
description: "Pull commits and tickets in parallel, then digest."

model: mock/echo                       # swap for ollama/llama3.2:3b or any provider

tasks:
  - id: commits
    exec:
      command: "sleep 0.4 && git log --oneline -5 2>/dev/null || printf 'feat: resume'"

  - id: tickets
    exec:
      command: "sleep 0.3 && printf 'NIKA-42 open'"

  - id: digest
    depends_on: [commits, tickets]
    infer:
      prompt: "Digest commits ${{ tasks.commits.output }} and tickets ${{ tasks.tickets.output }}"
      max_tokens: 400

outputs:
  digest: "${{ tasks.digest.output }}"

​
Before · nika inspect

Static anatomy: the DAG’s wave groups (what runs in parallel), plus three planning lines — the parallelism width, the pinch points, and each task’s blast radius. Zero execution, zero tokens: 
$ nika inspect standup-digest.nika.yaml
standup-digest · 3 tasks · 2 waves · ≥ $0.0000 (floor — unbounded tasks)
  ╭ wave 1 ── 2 in parallel ─╮
  │ ◆ commits  exec          │
  │ ◆ tickets  exec          │
  ╰──────────────────────────╯
    ↓
  ◆ digest   infer · mock/echo
  (no orphans · DAG check NIKA-DAG-001 clean)

parallelism  width 2 · can run together: commits · tickets
pinch        digest · nothing else runs while these run
blast        commits blocks 1 · tickets blocks 1
Read it before a long run the way you read a query plan before an expensive query.

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During · the live render

In an interactive terminal, nika run animates a storyboard: tasks light up as their dependencies clear, in the wave order inspect predicted. Piped (CI logs, tee), the same run prints one plain, deterministic frame instead — ∥ marks tasks that ran in parallel: 
$ nika run standup-digest.nika.yaml
  🦋 nika · standup-digest · 3 tasks
     permits ✓ engine floor (no boundary declared)

  ✔  commits  exec · sleep       416ms ∥
  ✔  tickets  exec · sleep       312ms ∥
  ✔  digest   infer · mock/echo    0ms
  ── 3/3 done · $0.000 · elapsed 0.4s ────────────────────────────
Four render modes, one per audience:
FlagSurface
(none, terminal)Live animated storyboard, then waterfall + verdict card
--no-progressOne plain final frame (the CI-stable surface · default when piped)
--quietThe final verdict line only — ✔ standup-digest · 3 tasks · 0.4s · $0.000
--jsonPure NDJSON events on stdout, progress to stderr (the machine lane · see Traces)

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After · the waterfall and the verdict card

An interactive run ends with two frames. The waterfall shows where the wall-clock went — overlapping bars are the parallelism you actually got. The verdict card compresses the run into one box: the wave shape (◆◆ ⇉ ◆ — two in parallel, then one), tasks, waves, retries, duration, cost, model, and the typed outputs it produced: 
  commits  ▕██████████████████████████████████▏  416ms
  tickets  ▕         █████████████████████████▏  305ms
  digest   ▕                                 █▏    0ms
  0s ···································· 417ms
  ╭─ nika ✓ standup-digest ───────────────────╮
  │  ◆◆ ⇉ ◆    3 tasks · 2 waves · 0 retries  │
  │  418ms · $0.0000 · mock/echo              │
  │  outputs → digest (string)                │
  ╰───────────────────────────────────────────╯
The same frames are recoverable from any recorded trace, hours or machines later: 
nika run standup-digest.nika.yaml --json > .nika/traces/standup.ndjson

nika trace show   .nika/traces/standup.ndjson   # storyboard + waterfall + verdict card
nika trace replay .nika/traces/standup.ndjson   # re-render the run live · never re-execute
trace show prints the final frames; trace replay plays the recorded events through the same renderer that drew the original run. Replay calls no model and runs no command — it is a projection of what already happened (Traces & replay).

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Terminals & CI

The live surfaces are TTY-only by design. Piped or NO_COLOR output is the sober register (plain per-line events — what CI logs want). Two render themes ship: unicode (default) and --ascii (every glyph has an ASCII twin — use it on terminals without good box-drawing fonts, including older Windows setups; Windows Terminal renders the default theme fine). --no-color, NO_COLOR, and CLICOLOR_FORCE follow the standard resolution order.