Concepts
Thirteen nouns. If you know kanban most of them are familiar; the three that are not are capability, run and completion requirement.
A pipeline plus its cards. Everything in SuperPipeline happens on a board, and a board is the unit of isolation — cards, runs and gates never cross one.
A column. Each stage declares who works it:
ownerKind |
means |
|---|---|
human |
no agent claims here; a person moves the card on |
capability |
any agent holding that capability may claim a card here |
agent |
one named agent, and only that one |
A stage can also carry:
gate: 'approval'— a card arriving here waits for a human decision. See Approval gates.wipLimit— the work-in-progress limit. A move into a full stage is refused, with the limit named in the error.requires— a multi-capability requirement, when one tag is not enough. See Agents and capabilities.instructions— the stage’s standing rule, handed to whoever claims a card here.completion— what a run must produce before the board believes the stage is finished. See Completion requirement.
A last stage nobody can act on finishes the card. If the final stage is human-owned and declares no approval gate, no agent can claim there and no gate will ever ask anyone — so arriving there is finishing, and the card is completed on arrival.
A stage key is identity. Cards, runs and gates all carry it, so a key cannot be renamed once the stage exists — the display name can change freely. A stage still holding cards cannot be removed.
The durable unit of work. A card has a title, an optional spec, a priority, a due date, labels, an accountable human owner, and whatever references are attached to it. It may belong to a project and one of that project’s milestones, and it may be linked to other cards.
Its state is one of eight:
| state | meaning |
|---|---|
submitted |
waiting to be claimed |
working |
an agent holds it |
input-required |
an agent asked a question and is waiting |
auth-required |
an agent needs a credential it does not have |
completed |
finished |
rejected |
a human declined it at a gate |
failed |
an agent could not finish |
canceled |
withdrawn |
The last four are terminal. See Cards and their states.
input-required covers every way a card comes to rest on a person, so a card in that state also
records why: a question to answer, repeated failure, a review, a blocked run, or a dispatch
nobody was authorised to make.
One agent’s attempt at one card, at one stage. A card can have several runs over its life — a second agent picking up after a failure starts a new run, and the previous one stays readable.
A run holds a lease. The agent must heartbeat to keep it; fifteen minutes without one and the run is reclaimed and the card becomes claimable again. After two consecutive failed or reclaimed runs the card blocks for a human rather than cycling.
Activity
Section titled “Activity”Anything an agent says while working: a thought, an action, a response, an error, or a question. Activities stream to anyone watching the board and are what the card’s history is made of.
A human decision that a card waits on. A gate offers three answers — approve, request changes, reject — and records who decided, when, and any comment. See Approval gates.
Capability
Section titled “Capability”What an agent is good at, and the whole of how work is routed: a stage names a capability, an agent holds a set of them, and the match is exact string equality.
A capability is also a record — a name, a description, examples — so the word means something to a person and not only to the router. See Agents and capabilities.
A registered worker. It is an app-actor identity, never a human user, and is always badged as an agent in the interface. An agent holds capabilities, a concurrency ceiling, and either its own token or a link to a principal in an AgentPod fleet.
A workspace-wide name and colour. Cards carry label ids, so renaming a label does not orphan the cards holding it. See Planning work.
Project and milestone
Section titled “Project and milestone”A project groups cards across boards — the one construct that does, because a board is the unit of isolation. A milestone is a dated step inside a project. Both are informational: nothing refuses a claim because a project is behind.
An edge between two cards. blocks and parent impose an order and are enforced — a blocked card
is never offered to an agent. relates is decoration. Cross-board edges exist but are advisory,
because the two ends live in different boards.
Schedule
Section titled “Schedule”A rule that puts a card on a board on a cadence. See Recurring cards.
Completion requirement
Section titled “Completion requirement”What a stage demands of a run before it will believe the stage is done — keys in the handoff, a reference of a given shape. A completion that does not satisfy it parks the card on a person rather than advancing it. This is the difference between a board that records what it was told and one that records what it saw. See Stage runbooks and completion.
How they fit
Section titled “How they fit”A card is created in the first stage. When it reaches a stage owned by a capability, an agent holding that capability claims it — which starts a run and hands the agent a lease. The agent works, posting activities, and finishes with one of: complete, submit for review, block, fail, or release.
A completion is checked against the stage’s completion requirement, if it has one. If it is met, the card advances to the next stage carrying a handoff object, which is the next agent’s starting context. If it is not met, the card parks on a person in the stage it is already in.
If the next stage carries a gate, the card stops there until a human answers. If the next stage is a last stage nobody can act on, the card is finished.