Buttons on a Step

Every control on a step card — starting with the two that are easy to confuse.

Hover or select a step on the canvas and its available controls appear; keyboard focus reveals them too. Run, Confirm and structural controls stay in the header; Edit and Download sit over the top-right of a media preview because they act on that artifact. Selecting an edge uses the same preview corner to identify the target input instead.

Most controls are self-explanatory. Two are not, and the difference between them is most of what makes IceFold different from a pipeline that just runs.

▶ Run vs. ✓ Confirm

They both "make things go", so it's tempting to treat them as the same button. They are not. The difference isn't whether something executes — it's whose decision the click is, and how far it reaches.

▶ Run — asking a question

"If I take the draft above me exactly as it stands, what does this step give me?"

Run is manual and it acts on one step. It reads whatever its inputs hold right now — including an upstream output you have not confirmed yet. That is the whole point: you get to preview a draft chain before endorsing anything in it.

The button reads Run this step the first time and Rerun this step afterwards (or Run / Rerun all content versions on a fanned-out step). Input steps don't have one — for those, ✓ submits and confirms the input.

IceFold distinguishes two upstream conditions and tells you which applies:

• the upstream's output is still going to change — it's running, queued, or out of date and due to re-run. What it's showing you now is about to be replaced, so a run against it may need to be repeated. You can wait, or choose Run with current inputs in the warning to proceed deliberately.
• the upstream has produced nothing at all — there is nothing to read. IceFold names the empty input instead of quietly sending an empty prompt to a model on your behalf.

Being unconfirmed is not one of them.

✓ Confirm — making a decision

"This artifact is good. Hand it to the next Steps."

Confirm is an endorsement, and it also hands the result downstream. Newly ready automatic Steps may run and spend credits. Steps set to Run manually, pinned outputs and human-edited outputs remain barriers; Pause for confirmation adds the next review gate.

Because it endorses, the default action has the stricter guard: if an upstream Step is still changing or waiting for confirmation, IceFold pauses and names it. That keeps an ordinary click from looking like the whole chain was reviewed.

When every blocker has finished and is only waiting for confirmation — and this Step already read those current outputs — the same warning offers Use this output & continue. This is a one-time local Confirm: it publishes from this Step, without confirming upstream Steps or starting their other branches. It does not pin the output or turn it into a human-edited checkpoint. Confirming those same upstream outputs later will not rerun this Step; producing genuinely new upstream output makes it out of date and returns it to its normal Run manually / Pause for confirmation settings. If an upstream is still running or this output is already stale, wait or rerun. Use Pin output when you intend to preserve the old bytes long-term.

The ✓ is purple while the step is unconfirmed and turns green once you confirm it. Clicking a green one means something different, and the tooltip says so:

• Confirm & run next steps (purple) — accept this output; downstream proceeds.
• Confirm again & rerun next steps (green) — you're confirming something again, so IceFold treats it as new: eligible automatic downstream Steps re-run until they reach a manual, pinned, human-edited or review barrier. Use it when you want a fresh pass, not as a way to "double-check" — the reruns may cost credits.

You choose where these gates sit. Turn on Pause for confirmation on a Step and it stops after running so you can look before the Flow moves on. A Step without that gate confirms automatically when it finishes — you never asked it to stop there.

Confirming a preview does not rerun it

The part worth internalising:

Run never confirms anything for you.

Preview a step against an unconfirmed upstream, like what you see, then go back and confirm that upstream — and the step you previewed stays exactly as it is. It is not reset, not re-run, and not charged again. IceFold remembers which input your preview actually read, so confirming that same input hands it nothing new.

The exception is the one you'd want: if you change the upstream between the preview and the confirm — re-run it, or edit its output by hand — then the input really is different. The step becomes out of date and follows its Run manually and Pause for confirmation settings. Confirming an input you altered is a real change; confirming one you didn't is not.

Editing an output by hand is different from locally confirming a preview. The edited content version gets an Edited provenance badge and upstream automation cannot silently overwrite that generation. Other content versions remain independent. An explicit Run replaces the edited generation and returns it to generated behaviour. Use Pin output, not the Edited marker, for a durable freeze.

Run itself may spend credits. The saving is that confirming an unchanged input does not repeat work you already previewed. Explore with Run; commit deliberately with Confirm.

	▶ Run	✓ Confirm
What you're saying	"What would this give me?"	"I accept this."
Reaches	just this step	newly ready automatic downstream Steps
May spend credits on	this step's run	downstream runs it starts
Needs the upstream confirmed?	no — that's the preview	by default; stable unconfirmed inputs can continue locally
Decides anything for you	never	that's the whole point

The rest of the card

• ■ Stop — abort a running step. It replaces ▶ while the step runs, so a step is never both runnable and stoppable.
• ↻ Rerun this content version — on a fanned-out step, each content version tab has its own rerun. Only that content version is recomputed; the others are left alone. Use ◀ / ▶ to page through the tabs when they don't all fit.
• ⬇ Download — save this step's output. Structured text uses its declared format (for example .srt for a subtitle timeline); other text defaults to .md.
• ✎ Next steps — a contextual menu that creates and wires the next reviewable step. Video suggests Edit video, Choose frame, and Extract audio; audio suggests Edit audio, Transcribe, Align subtitles, and Mix with music; image and text outputs offer their relevant read, generate, and animate actions. Same-medium refinements splice into the flow, while derived artifacts branch from it. File outputs also offer Replace output….
• 🔒 Pin output — preserve this output. A step with a pinned output won't run, rerun or accept output edits, and upstream changes won't reset it; Confirm can still publish those fixed bytes. Use Unpin output when you want the step to participate again. Unpin does not run it automatically: if inputs changed, press Run when you are ready. This is separate from Lock layout, which only prevents accidental dragging and resizing on the canvas.
• ⤢ Open expanded view — the full detail dialog (inputs, parameters, output, content versions). Double-clicking the card does the same thing.
• Rename step — use the pencil beside the title in Quick Properties or the expanded view, or right-click the card. This changes only the name you see; connections, outputs, and run state stay intact.
• ⧉ Enter subflow — on a Subflow step, open the graph it contains.

Related

• Troubleshooting → queued steps — usually an upstream that errored, or one that is waiting on a confirmation you haven't given.