You now have agents that act on their own and a line between what they may do and what they must ask about. But the work itself still lives in your head, or gets buried at the bottom of a report you skimmed once. This chapter gives every piece of work one home: a shared board that you and your agents both pull from.
9.12.1One board both of you pull from
Keep one work board: a single plain file that lists everything the operation still needs to do, business and technical, in one place. You add to it. Your agents add to it. Both of you read from it.
A report tells you what already happened. The board is the opposite: it is the list of what has not happened yet. When every task lives here, none of it lives in your head, and nothing gets lost between one session and the next.
Real trackers exist and you are skipping them on purpose. GitHub Issues and Projects is the closest call: it already sits in your remote repository, and your agent can reach it. Linear, Trello, and Jira are the heavier options.
A plain file wins for now because an agent reads it with zero setup and it lives beside the code. Move to a real tracker the day a second human joins, or the day the work needs comments and history rather than a status.
9.12.2Every piece of work is a ticket
Each item on the board is a ticket: a title, a status, and a who that says whether you or an agent owns it. Nothing heavier. You should read the whole board at a glance, not learn a tool.
9.12.3Status moves one way, never backward
A ticket walks the ladder in one direction: idea, then optionally needs-approval, then ready, then doing, then done. It never jumps a rung.
The rule that makes this safe is narrow: an agent may only start a ticket that is ready and assigned to an agent. An idea is just a thought. A needs-approval is yours to clear. Only ready is open season, and only for the work you marked as an agent's to take.
9.12.4An agent claims a ticket before it works
Before an agent touches a ready ticket, it flips the status to doing and writes its name in who. That claim is what stops two agents from grabbing the same work at once, so a team of agents can share one workspace without clobbering each other.
Then it does the smallest safe thing the ticket asks, and marks it done. If the work turns out to be risky, costly, or hard to undo, it does not push ahead: it flips the ticket to needs-approval and stops. That is the decision queue from the guardrails chapter, now generalized: every escalation, from any agent, surfaces as one ticket on the one board you already watch.
Rule of thumb: if you cannot see all of tomorrow's work on one screen, the board has grown a process it does not need. Cut fields, not tickets.
9.12.5Stand up your shared board
This prompt turns the work in your head into a board you both share:
Do this now: paste the prompt, stand up your one board, and move every task living in your head onto it as a ticket.
