Reference · 01

The board

State transitions are the process, so every column means something exact. This is the whole vocabulary — there is deliberately nothing else.

Columns

Column	Means	Note
`Backlog`	Untriaged	Symphony's triage lane: delegate a ticket here and it gets a triage session within the minute
`Needs Grilling`	Waits for a session	The questions are entangled or open-form; the agenda is on the ticket
`Needs Decision`	Waits for one reply	A decision card answerable from a phone; answer, then drag to Backlog or Todo
`Todo`	Ready to go, by whoever is tagged	Delegated → an agent implements; handed back → a person's task, exactly as a colleague would
`In Progress`	An agent is working	—
`Human Review`	The human gate	Spec sign-off, or PR review once a PR is linked; a person opens the gate by moving the ticket to Ship
`Ship`	Landing in progress	Never parked — a ticket never sits in Ship with nobody working it
`Blocked`	An implementation that cannot proceed	Always carries the agent's diagnosis; never a triage destination
`Done`	Verified in production	Not merely merged; for repos with no deploy, the repo's own delivery facts name its terminal evidence in advance
`Duplicate`	The same ask, already open elsewhere	Points at the survivor, which is the older ticket; anything only this one said moved onto it first
`Not Planned`	A deliberate no	One ticket per declined ask, the reason in its closing comment, later asks marked duplicates of it — so one ticket accretes the history
`Canceled`	Invalid, or never was	Kept distinct from Not Planned so a search can tell a deliberate no from a never-was

What is not here matters too. A state no stage reads is a state the process cannot explain, so the board keeps exactly the states the process uses — columns have been removed when the machinery that needed them went.

Routes: what a ticket waits for

Triage's four routes — ready-for-agent, ready-for-human, needs-decision, needs-grilling — are claims about what the ticket waits for, never about what anyone is doing to it. On this board each route is a column, so the board answers the question by itself and no route is ever a label. The full routing logic — how a route falls out of drafting the ticket, and the four-clause test that separates a card from a session — is on the triage page.

Why the vocabulary is this small

Columns say where work stands — in the spine or parked, and parked columns say what the ticket waits for. No column ever says what someone is doing — activity is visible in the session and the PR, and duplicating it into state produces states that lie. Retired vocabulary is renamed, never deleted, so the history of closed tickets keeps making sense.