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.
3.12.1One 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.
3.12.2Every 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.
# ticket: retry the failed payouts
status: ready # idea -> needs-approval -> ready -> doing -> done
who: agent
note: 3 payouts failed this week; retry them once.
# the status ladder
idea a rough thought, not ready to work
needs-approval waiting on your yes (risky, costs money, hard to undo)
ready approved and safe; an agent may pick it up
doing claimed and in progress (one owner at a time)
done finished and logged
3.12.3Status 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.
3.12.4An 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, the same file-as-a-lock discipline that lets a team of agents share a 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.
3.12.5Stand up your shared board
This prompt turns the work in your head into a board you both share:
Act as a senior engineer setting up a shared work board for
my operation. Create one plain board file where both I and
my agents file work as tickets, each with a title, a status
(idea, needs-approval, ready, doing, done), and an owner.
Then have an agent take the top ready ticket assigned to it,
mark it doing so nothing else grabs it, do the smallest safe
thing, and mark it done. Anything risky, flip it to
needs-approval and stop.
My operation and the work piling up right now:
Do this now: paste the prompt, stand up your one board, and move every task living in your head onto it as a ticket.
