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Board Planner
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Core concepts

Six words carry most of the meaning in this product.

A container for tasks, sprints, columns, categories, custom fields and members. Each project has a unique key (ORB) which prefixes its task keys. Projects are independent: columns and fields configured in one do not leak into another.

A project’s key starts with a letter and holds up to 20 letters, digits, hyphens or underscores. It cannot change once the project exists, because every task key is built from it and none of them are stored.

Projects in the sidebar opens a card per board, in the same order the sidebar shows them; clicking one opens that board. You see the boards you have been granted and no others, so the page is also the honest answer to “what do I have access to?”. Creating a board is an administrator’s act, so New Project is offered only to them — and on an instance with no boards yet, only an administrator is invited to make the first one.

The unit of work. It has a key (ORB-14), a title, an optional Markdown description, a priority, a category, an assignee, a status, and whatever custom fields the project defines. Tasks can carry acceptance criteria as a checklist, link to pull requests, block one another, and belong to a sprint.

A column is what you see on the board. A role is what automation sees. Every column carries exactly one of six roles:

Role Meaning Default column
backlog Captured, not approved. Workers never claim these. Planned
approved Ready to be picked up. Workers claim from here. To Do
active Being worked on right now. In Progress
review Waiting for a check. A human gate. In Review, Needs Human Review, Ready to Test
blocked Stopped by something outside the task.
done Finished. Done

Rename To Do to Ready for dev and nothing breaks, because the automation reads approved, not the label.

A named, time-boxed period with a goal. A sprint is planned, active or completed, and tasks are assigned to it individually. Sprints are optional — a board works fine without them.

Categories are the built-in task types (bug, doc, user-story, idea), editable per project. Custom fields are anything else you want to record: a Choice for sizing, a date, a number, a yes / no. Custom fields can appear as a column in the list view and drive filters.

Three different things, easy to confuse:

  • An agent is an ordered list of steps and gates that a worker runs, named on a task’s Agent row — see Agents. Claude Code or any other MCP client working the board is an MCP client, not an agent in this sense.
  • The PM agent lives inside the app. You chat with it about a project; it can also review the board on a schedule.
  • A worker is a process on a machine you control. It claims approved tasks, runs the agent each one names in an isolated checkout, and reports every step back to the task.