Work: Development and Sessions

Plan is what we intend. Work is what’s actually happening: which branches are moving, which sessions are running them, and what that’s costing.

Development

A board of branches, not cards — a card names the work, a branch is where it’s being done, and one branch can carry several cards. Five columns:

Column	Means
Ready	Created; nothing has run on it yet
Coding	Being worked, by an agent or by a person — these are shown separately: a session running is one badge, someone having claimed the branch is the column
Review	The last run finished and someone has to read it (only reached automatically in a project that requires review — see Rules)
Done	Reviewed and accepted, or a project with no review requirement’s run finished cleanly
Not done	Sent back with a note — not simply “Coding” again, because the next session is handed that note instead of the card

All five accept a drop, but who may move what differs: a person moves a branch when no session is on it; the platform moves it while one is. Two buttons stay buttons rather than becoming drags, because each carries something a drag can’t:

• Ask an agent to review (in Review) — starts a review session against the branch, with nothing chosen: model and effort blank means Auto, and it runs on whichever machine already holds the checkout, since that’s the only place the diff is.
• Done / Not done… — the human verdict. Not done asks for a note, which the next session receives instead of the card, and offers two destinations for the branch’s cards: back to Considering (the approach needs rethinking) or Declined (not doing this — the note becomes the reason).
• Merge… (in Done, owners only) — queues the merge on one of your machines. cawdev holds no git credentials, so this always happens on a runner you own, and the cards move to Merged once that machine reports the pull request landed.
• Fix it (in Not done) — starts a fresh session carrying the rejection note.

Sessions

Every agent session the project has had, live and finished.

1. Start one from a card (“Start development…”), from the Development board, or from the composer. The branch name is pre-filled following the project’s convention (r12-slug-of-title) — change it if you know better.

2. A runner claims it off the queue; the session moves to Running. You don’t pick which machine — runners claim work rather than being assigned it, so what matters is whether anything is listening, and the console shows you that rather than asking you to guess.

3. The agent moves its card itself — the console never does. That’s deliberate: a card’s status means “someone is actually working on this”, not “someone queued this”.

4. Progress arrives as it happens, in a live terminal. If a decision is genuinely yours, it asks and stops — you’ll see the question inline, or in the Inbox from anywhere in the console.

Nothing sweeps a session waiting on you

A session stalled on a person is correct, and a person may reasonably take a day. What is swept is a session whose runner goes quiet — that one fails with a reason saying so, rather than sitting Running forever.

A project runs one live session per working copy at a time — sessions share a checkout, so a second one on the same branch is refused, readably. A project with several checkouts of the same repository can run that many sessions in parallel.

Cancel reaches the runner on its next poll and takes down the whole process tree an agent started — a build it kicked off doesn’t get left running. Anything already committed stays committed; cancelling and re-running means a new session, keeping the record of what actually happened.

A stopped session offers up to four things, depending on what its working copy holds:

Action	Does
Carry on	Resume on the same machine, or the runner that’s free
Hand off…	Push the branch, send the uncommitted tree as a patch, and free the checkout for something else — the next session picks the patch up on a fresh runner
Start over	Discard, reset the checkout, and start a fresh session in the same slot
Discard	Drop the uncommitted work and free the checkout, ending resumability

Permission requests

A session that hits something no standing rule covers stops and asks, rather than being silently denied or silently allowed. Answering it from the run page offers the three lengths of yes cawdev’s CLI offers at the terminal — once, for the rest of this run, or as a standing project rule — so a decision made here can outlive the session that asked it.

Insights

The retrospective numbers: how long planning and coding actually take on this project, and what a session costs in tokens. It sits after Sessions because it’s about them — the totals of what’s above.