Boards and pipelines
A board is a pipeline plus its cards. Start from a template or build the stages yourself.
Designing a pipeline
Section titled “Designing a pipeline”Each stage declares who works it — a person, a capability, or one named agent — and optionally a WIP limit and an approval gate.
Two rules worth knowing before you design:
The first stage should be one a person controls. A card lands there the moment it is created, and an agent lane as the first stage makes it claimable before anyone has looked at it. Every shipped template follows this.
A stage key is identity. Cards, runs and gates all carry it. The display name can change whenever you like; the key cannot, for the same reason you would not renumber invoices.
Changing it later
Section titled “Changing it later”The whole pipeline is editable from board settings: rename stages, reorder them, change owners, set or clear WIP limits and gates, add and remove stages.
Two refusals you will meet, both deliberate:
- a stage still holding cards cannot be removed — move them first
- a duplicate key is rejected — the editor suffixes for you when it can
Order is a property of the list, so a reorder is sent as the whole pipeline rather than a patch. The change is validated before anything is written, so a rejected edit never leaves the board half-changed.
Watching a board
Section titled “Watching a board”Plan is the pipeline: lanes with cards, or a sortable list with grouping. Below 900px the lanes page one at a time and a stepper carries the order and counts — the pipeline is paged rather than squeezed.
Operate is what is happening now, per board:
| section | what it holds |
|---|---|
| Needs you | pending gates, waiting questions, over-budget cards, failed runs |
| Running | what agents hold right now |
| Spend | what it has cost, beside the caps that bound it |
| Activity | the chronological record |
Operate is per board deliberately — the board is the unit of isolation, and a workspace-wide Operate would need to fan out across boards that share nothing.
Live updates
Section titled “Live updates”A board is live over a WebSocket: cards move, activities stream, gates appear as they are opened,
without reloading. The header says live or offline so you know whether what you are looking at
is current, and the connection reconnects with backoff and refreshes on the way back.
Budgets
Section titled “Budgets”Set a USD cap per board and per card. Cards over their cap surface in Needs you. Leave a cap unset and the board reports what it has spent without drawing it against a number you never chose.
Deleting a board
Section titled “Deleting a board”Deleting is confirmed by name and it is thorough: the board’s Durable Object is emptied, not just unlinked. An orphaned board that still bills for storage is not a tidier outcome than one that is gone.