The five-state board Shipped
Five states, and the two that check anything
The states are Linear's, on purpose — nobody needs a new vocabulary for work. What is different is that two of the transitions are gates: one will not let work start without a spec, and one will not let it close without evidence.
The five
| State | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Triage | One line, from anywhere. A request that has not been scoped is not work in progress |
| Todo | Scoped and accepted: the four fields are answered and the zones are named |
| In Progress | The first gate. A grant exists, bound to one task and one branch, and it expires |
| In Review | Handed in. The zones closed in the same breath the board moved |
| Done | The second gate. A manifest, the evidence the quality gate named, and a record on the branch |
A task lands in Triage in about four seconds — measured once, for one task, on one machine. Capture is meant to be cheap; it is the two gates that are meant to cost something.
The task spec: four fields, asked once
The first gate refuses to open without these. They are the design-doc fields, not a ceremony invented here.
- Goal — what this should do, in a sentence
- Non-goals — what it must not do. This is the field that prevents most accidents: it names the tempting adjacent change before anyone is tempted
- Affected zones — which protected areas it needs, which is also the access request
- Acceptance criteria — how anyone will know it worked. It becomes the checklist at review
There is no mandatory checklist beyond these four, anywhere in the product, and that restraint was argued for three times with data. A tool that blocks legitimate work gets uninstalled in week two.
The gate is a transition, not a command
There is no open-zone. Access exists because a task moved, and it is bound to the branch that task named. That matters more than it sounds: the moment a second door exists it becomes the one everybody uses in a hurry, and a gate with a bypass command is a suggestion with extra steps.
Closing is the same shape in reverse. The second gate computes a change manifest from the branch, asks for the evidence the quality gate names, and writesthe audit record last, so it contains everything else.
Spike mode, for the work that should not survive
Exploration leaves residue: code that shipped because nobody decided it should not. A spike is time-boxed and disposable by default — promoted deliberately or discarded, on aspike/ branch, with sandbox tables that get dropped together.
The schema zone stays shut for the whole of it, regardless of what the grant says. It is the one place a git revert cannot save you, which is why it is the zone the setup always creates.
Where it stops
- It is not a better tracker. Linear and Jira are better boards and will stay better. If you already have one, the interesting story is a gate over it — not replacing it.
- The console cannot close a task. Closing diffs a branch, and a server has no repository. A button that can only fail is not offered.
- An agent can ask the gate, never bypass it. The MCP tools file, scope and — over the connector — ask for a transition; the gate decides by the same rules whoever asks, and no tool approves access.
The states and their transitions are in the docs, the model a task declares against is the zone map, and what it leaves behind isthe record.