Skip to content

Concepts

Agentic models a piece of work as a task, then attaches everything else to it. This page explains the parts and how they relate.

The nouns

Concept What it is
Task The unit of work. Everything hangs off it. Carries an agent-maintained summary and next_steps.
Item Something external: a Slack thread, GitHub issue or pull request, Drive doc, URL, note, or commit. Items are deduplicated by URL or external id.
Association A link between an item and a task (many-to-many), with a note.
Person An individual a task or an item involves: a name plus optional email, handle, and notes. Linked to tasks and items many-to-many.
Worktree An isolated git worktree created for a task from a registered repository.
Repository group A named set of repositories. Picking one on a task tells the agent those checkouts may hold information relevant to it.
Agent run One prompt sent to a harness in a working directory, delivered to the worker through the run queue. Events stream live to the UI.
Agent session An agent session recorded against a task: its session id, harness, working directory, and a label. A run records the session it produced; this records one you attach by hand, for example one you opened in OpenChamber. Both build the links that reopen it.
Context refresh A special agent run that reads the task and its items and writes the summary and next_steps.
Scheduled task A user-defined shell script the API runs on a cron schedule, with a recorded history of runs.
Change A unit of factory output recorded against a task: a class, a lifecycle, a start and end time, and a human-intervened flag. Autonomy rate and yield are computed from changes.
Stack entry A task's place on the focus stack: its position (0 is current), whether it is current, and a soft-delete timestamp.
Task session A stretch of time a stack entry spent as the current task. Execution count and duration are derived from these.
Operation An audit record of a mutating request: its method, path, and status, plus which client sent it (web UI, CLI, or raw API) and whether a human or a coding agent was behind it.

How the parts relate

  • A task has zero or more items, people, repositories, worktrees, runs, sessions, changes, and dependency links.
  • The task to repository relation is many-to-many, so a task can span several repositories.
  • Dependencies form a directed acyclic graph: the API refuses a link that would close a cycle.
  • Every open, in-progress, or blocked task is on the focus stack automatically.

Timeline and provenance

Every meaningful change writes a timeline event, so a task's evolution is visible at a glance.

Each timeline event also carries its provenance: the client it came from and whether a person or an agent performed it. The web UI sends web and human. The CLI sends cli plus whatever actor its environment declares. The ACP runner sets AGENTIC_ACTOR=agent for a harness, so agent work is told apart from human work.

Every mutating request is also recorded in the operations log (GET /api/operations).