Tasks

What a task is

A task is a piece of work you hand to your agents and walk away from: a feature to build, a capability to add, an integration to wire up, a platform to bring online, a bug to fix. Spaceboy tracks it from the moment it starts to the moment it ships — the agent run, the merge, the code review, the deploy — and tells you when it's done or when it needs you.

Tasks are how you stop being the bottleneck. Chatting in the workspace is a conversation — you watch each change land in the live preview. A task is a delegation: describe the outcome, and an agent plans and builds it in a workspace of its own while you keep working on something else, review a teammate's checkpoint, or close your laptop entirely. Fire off three ideas on your way to lunch; come back to three reviewed changes.

Start a task from anywhere

Every surface reaches the same agents, and every door mints the same tracked task:

• Workspace chat — describe substantial work and the agent proposes it as a task; confirm the card and it runs in the background while your chat stays free.
• Project pages — turning on a capability (accounts, payments, AI, documents), adding a platform, wiring an integration, or changing auth methods launches the work as a task.
• Slack — /repobot task <description> in a linked channel hands the work off and posts progress back to the channel.
• The CLI — repobot task "Add a pricing page" --project <id> starts one from your terminal or from another coding agent; --wait follows it to the finish.
• The iPhone app — running tasks appear in the agent's task strip, and you can start and follow them on the go.
• Schedules — standing instructions that run every hour, day, or week, each run tracked as a normal task.

An independent workspace for every task

When a task starts, Spaceboy cuts a fresh branch from your project's shared line of work and provisions a dedicated, isolated environment for it — its own running copy of the app, its own agent session. The task builds there and nowhere else: it can't disturb your sandbox, your teammates' sandboxes, or anything deployed. These task workspaces don't clutter your environment switcher; the Tasks page simply shows how many are active.

When the agent finishes, the task's work merges back into the shared sandbox line and the workspace is retired. If the merge conflicts with work that landed in the meantime, an agent gets one automated pass to resolve it; if that isn't enough, the task asks for your attention and its branch is preserved so nothing is lost.

Running tasks in parallel

Because every task has its own workspace, tasks run in parallel — on every plan, with no per-plan cap. Hand off as many tasks as your work calls for and they run side by side; each task's agent work is metered like any other agent run, so parallelism costs exactly what the work costs — no more.

A per-project infrastructure ceiling protects the platform in the rare case a project has an unusually large number of tasks in flight at once: the extras queue and launch automatically as capacity frees up. The queue is visible on the Tasks page and on every task's card.

Tasks are never refused — hand off any number of them, and queued tasks start on their own; you never have to babysit the queue.

From task to production

A finished task doesn't stop at "the code is written." After its work merges to the shared sandbox line, Spaceboy automatically opens a promotion: a pull request into main that must pass the repository's own release checks — install, lint, tests. A red check blocks the merge with its exact output, the authoring side gets one automated fix pass, and green checks merge and deploy. The task's status rides the whole pipeline, so "Completed" means checked, merged, and shipped — not just committed.

Your own sandbox picks the finished work up the same way it picks up anything else: the workspace tells you main has moved ahead and offers Sync with main.

The task lifecycle

Every task moves through the same states:

• Proposed — the agent suggested it in chat and is waiting for your confirmation.
• Queued — confirmed and waiting for a parallel workspace slot.
• Running — an agent is building in the task's workspace, or the finished work is riding review and merge.
• Needs attention — the work stopped and you're needed: a merge conflict the agent couldn't resolve, or a review that rejected the change. The task's detail page shows exactly what happened.
• Completed / Failed / Canceled — terminal. Completed means the work passed review and merged.

Following your tasks

Tasks report to you, not the other way around. Live task cards appear in the chat and on the pages that started them; the project's Tasks page gathers everything in flight from every surface; each task's detail page shows a full event timeline. You're notified when a task finishes or needs you — in the dashboard, in Slack if the task started there, and on your phone.

# Follow tasks from the terminal
repobot tasks list --project <id>
repobot tasks watch <taskId>