---
title: "The board: five states and two real gates | CommitCycle"
description: "Five fixed states, and the two transitions that check something — where a grant is minted and where work is allowed to close."
url: https://commitcycle.com/docs/concepts/the-board/
language: en
---

# The board and its two gates

> Five fixed states, and the two transitions that check something — where a grant is minted and where work is allowed to close.

Work enters CC through a board with **five fixed states**: Triage, Todo, In Progress, In Review, Done — plus Canceled. They are the data model, not a preference, and they live in a database `CHECK` constraint precisely so that there is nothing to add a row to.

The names come from [Linear’s default workflow](https://commitcycle.com/docs/reference/glossary/) rather than from us. A gate that sits over your tracker should not ask you to learn a fifth vocabulary for the same five things.

## The states

| State           | What it means                               | How work leaves it                                                      |
| --------------- | ------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Triage**      | A one-line request. Nobody has agreed to it | Scoping it — the four fields                                            |
| **Todo**        | Scoped and accepted, not started            | **The main gate** ↓                                                     |
| **In Progress** | A grant exists, bound to a branch           | `cycle submit` — or `cycle pause`, back to Todo, handing the grant back |
| **In Review**   | Work handed in, evidence attached           | **The closing gate** ↓                                                  |
| **Done**        | Closed, with an audit record                | —                                                                       |
| **Canceled**    | Dropped. Kept, not deleted                  | —                                                                       |

Only two of those transitions check anything. The rest are bookkeeping, and calling them gates would dilute the word.

## The main gate — Todo → In Progress

This is the one that mints access. It refuses to start work that has not been described:

- The [task spec](https://commitcycle.com/docs/concepts/task-spec/) is complete — goal, non-goals, affected zones, acceptance criteria.
- Every declared zone exists in the [zone map](https://commitcycle.com/docs/concepts/zones/).
- Any `high` risk zone the task declared **for write** has its owner’s approval.

Passing it produces a [grant](https://commitcycle.com/docs/concepts/grants/): time-boxed, bound to the task **and** to a git branch, opening exactly the zones that were declared and nothing else.

**There is no command that opens a zone directly.** Only the board issues grants: here, at the start, and afterwards only an owner’s answer to an access request widens one, while a renewal re-issues the same zones with a new expiry. That is the design’s load-bearing property — not a policy, an absence. A back door has to exist before it can be found, and the only route into In Progress runs through the gate.

## The closing gate — In Review → Done

The second check asks whether the work can honestly be called finished:

- A **change manifest** exists — what actually changed, computed from git by the CLI, or reported by the closer over the connector and labelled as reported in the audit record.
- The task’s [quality gate](https://commitcycle.com/docs/operations/closing-gate/) is satisfied, with evidence attached where one is required.
- In governance mode, a file in a protected zone the task did not declare refuses the close, with the surplus named — and so does a file in a zone the task declared for **read** only (CC-1300). A file in no zone passes, and is recorded as a **logged exception** rather than silently accepted.
- In governance mode, a `high` risk zone declared for write still needs an approval that was granted for this task at some point; the board’s close refuses one that never had it (CC-1300).

Closing without knowing what changed is precisely what the gate exists to prevent, so a missing manifest refuses the close rather than warning about it.

What the gate and the close judge a task by — its declared zones, its quality gate, its mode — cannot be edited once the task has left Todo (CC-1313). The rest of the spec stays correctable.

## What the board does on its own

Every 15 minutes the board runs a bounded sweep (`apps/api/src/autopilot.ts`, CC-1346):

- an In Progress task whose grant expired more than **7 days** ago is paused back to Todo through the gate, with the reason on the record;
- an In Review task with no pull request for **14 days** is marked, so it shows up as needing attention;
- where the board has a repository registered and a GitHub App to ask, an In Review task whose pull request GitHub reports as merged is closed — through the same closing gate, which still refuses what it would refuse anyway.

A pull request’s merge counts only when GitHub says so: from the signed webhook or from the board asking GitHub itself. A merge reported by the CLI, the connector or an agent is kept as a claim and never as proof, and the console’s **Review and close** needs a merge GitHub confirmed — without one it sends the reviewer to `cycle verify --close`, which checks the branch reached the trunk (CC-1330, CC-1346). The console’s **GitHub** page shows what the board did on its own and what is waiting on a person (CC-1350, CC-1351).

## Where work enters from

Triage is deliberately cheap to reach. A request that has not been scoped is not work in progress, and making intake expensive is how teams end up with agents running against a sentence in chat.

- The console — measured at 4.0 seconds in-browser for a one-line request, with the typing scripted (CC-23, 2026-08-04).
- The [MCP server](https://commitcycle.com/docs/reference/mcp/) — `cc_intake`, without leaving the session you are already in.
- An API endpoint — `POST /v1/<tenant>/<repo>/tasks` with a title and a board credential. CommitCycle integrates with no tracker; a small bridge you write can file into Triage through this endpoint.

## What the board is not

It is not trying to replace your tracker. The first version ships its own because mapping five fixed states onto a workflow your team can rename is a per-customer configuration problem wearing a feature costume — and the five states have to stay fixed for the gate to mean anything.

If your team has an extra column, it belongs to your tracker. What reaches CC is a request filed into Triage — by hand, or by a bridge you write against the API. The moment CC lets you add a state, it has to decide what that state gates, and it cannot know.