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Work and its state

What is in flight, what is finished, and whether the repository agrees with the tracker.

Work and its state

Work that exists, work that is claimed to exist, and the gap between them. Stale tasks, implementations with no issue, issues marked done that the tests disagree with, and plans that are stored as prose so that no two copies say the same thing.

8 moments

Every moment that names this one. Derived from the moments; this page keeps no list.

  1. found two agents fixing the same bug in two branchesTwo workers spend a day each on one defect because ownership was implicit and neither could see the other. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  2. found a task "in progress" that nobody had touched for three weeksA status that was authored rather than computed is true at the moment of writing and decays silently from then on. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  3. read three roadmaps for one project and believed none of themA plan kept in prose is a snapshot, and every copy of it drifts on its own schedule; stored status is an assertion that stays true after the world moves. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  4. found five worktrees and could not say which of them still matteredIsolation is cheap to create and expensive to reason about: nothing records what a worktree was for or whether its work landed. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  5. found finished work on a branch that nobody ever mergedWorkers produce far more than integration absorbs, and nothing distinguishes work that is done from work that is done and landed. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  6. found a substantial change that no issue, ticket or plan ever asked forWork arrives with no bounded contract behind it, so its scope, its acceptance criteria and its ownership are all decided after the fact. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  7. closed an issue whose acceptance criteria nothing had actually checkedCompletion is recorded as a state change in a tracker rather than as evidence in the repository, so the two drift immediately. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  8. was asked how far the milestone had got and had to go and ask four peopleProgress is an aggregate that exists only in people, because the parts it aggregates were never recorded in a form anything can add up. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →