Everybody knows what a column board looks like. What changes here is that the columns are not decorative: they say who is allowed to move a card forward. Some doors only open for the machine, others only for you.
Every column has its character, and that is on purpose: from a distance, you read a board by the faces, not by the labels.
Planned
Running
Done
To deploy
Archived
Planned — where everything begins
A card is always born here. It waits with its request, its thinking level and, if you want, its start date. Nothing has been sent to an engine yet: it is your gesture of starting it that authorises the spending, never the arrival of the card.
It is also one of only two columns an agent is allowed to aim at: it can put a card back into the queue, but placing it there does not start it.
Running — an agent is working
The card has been taken over. It shows the progress, the task list ticking off and the thinking indicator. A card an agent is working on never shows up anywhere but here, and a card left in “Running” always says what is still going on.
You can stop it at any moment: the stop really acts, and it tells you what it did. An interrupted card picks up where it left off — it does not start over from zero.
Done — the machine has delivered
The card lands here on its own once the agent has handed in its report, with or without modified code. Neither you nor the agent pushes it: it is the tracking of the work that moves it. This is your review queue.
To deploy — the door only your hand opens
You have read it over and you approve. Cards pile up here as one batch, ready to go out together, with a button through to the history of their release. No agent, no automation can drop a card here.
A card that enters this column loses its release date — naturally, it has not gone out yet — and if the publish button is greyed out, it says why.
Archived — filed away, not lost
What is settled leaves the board without disappearing: the report, the estimate, the branch and the history stay readable. Like “To deploy” and “In production”, this column only reopens on a human gesture.
The summary, in three lines
- An agent can only aim at “Notes” or “Planned”. The rest is refused by the tool itself, not by a polite instruction.
- The machine puts cards into “Planned”, “Running” and “Done”, following the real state of the work.
- You alone open “To deploy” and “In production” — that is, everything to do with going live.
Two more columns complete the board: “Notes”, for what you keep at hand without making it a task, and “In production”, for what is actually live.
