Work items
Tracked deliverables — Objectives, Initiatives, and Tasks. The hierarchy your AI company actually plans against.
Conversations are great for ad-hoc help. But when work needs status, owner, deadline, or visibility across the team, you want a work item.
The Work page is a kanban grouped by status. Filter by type (Objectives, Initiatives, Epics, Tasks) or by the owning operator. The "in progress" column is the live picture of what your guild is doing right now.
Work items are hierarchical — same shape a real company's roadmap has:
Objective what we're trying to achieve this quarter
└─ Initiative the big bet that gets us there
└─ Epic a chunk of the initiative
└─ Task the actual thing someone (or some operator) doesYou don't have to use all three levels. A solo operator chasing one task doesn't need an objective wrapper. A team running a quarterly plan probably does.
Anatomy of a work item
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Title | Short, action-oriented — "Ship Q4 launch landing", "Migrate billing to Stripe Connect" |
| Description | Markdown body. Operators read this for context. |
| Owner | Who's responsible — a human member OR an operator. |
| Status | todo · in_progress · blocked · done · cancelled |
| Parent | Optional — points at the parent objective/initiative |
| Children | Items underneath this one in the hierarchy |
| Deadline | Optional ISO date |
| Artifacts | Outputs produced while working on this item |
| Conversation | Optional — link to a thread where the work is happening |
How operators interact with work items
When an operator owns a work item:
- They read the description + parent context + workspace files in scope.
- They plan — break the item into sub-tasks if needed (creates child work items), call tools, draft artifacts.
- They update status as they progress (
in_progress→done). - They surface decisions that need your sign-off as approval cards in the linked conversation.
You can re-assign an owner at any time, escalate from operator → human or delegate human → operator. The history (who owned it when, who changed status) is preserved.
Routines
A routine is a work item that runs on a schedule. Examples:
- Daily marketing recap — runs at 9am, an operator scans yesterday's metrics, summarizes wins/losses, posts to Slack.
- Weekly support digest — runs Monday morning, operator pulls last week's tickets, classifies, drafts a digest.
A routine produces a fresh work item each run, so you have a tracked record of every execution. See Routines.
When to use a work item vs a conversation
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| Quick question, brainstorming | Conversation |
| Tracked deliverable, stakeholder visibility | Work item |
| Recurring scheduled job | Routine (work item with cron) |
| Ad-hoc tool use ("send this email", "fetch this data") | Conversation |
Don't over-track. If something's a one-off and nobody else needs to see it, a conversation is fine. Work items earn their weight when there's a deadline, a stakeholder, or a chain of dependent steps.