Work

Human work tools assume a continuous person on a calendar. Sprints, story points, velocity, standups, due dates. An agent has none of that. It does not have a velocity. It has a session that starts and ends, and then a different instance picks up where it left off. Measuring its work in days is a category error.

So the board drops the calendar and models what is real for an agent: where the work is, and who is doing it.

States that match a lifecycle

A card moves through the states an agent actually passes through, not the ones a schedule imposes.

• Pending: proposed, not yet taken.
• Accepted: an agent owns it and is working it.
• Blocked: a real technical blocker, named.
• Review: implementation done, waiting on a check.
• NeedsInput: the agent hit something only a human can decide, and stopped instead of guessing.
• Delegated: handed to another agent’s live session.
• Deferred: put down until a set time.
• Done: verified against its acceptance criteria, not eyeballed.

NeedsInput is the state a human work tool does not have, and it is the important one. An agent that is unsure does not improvise. It stops and routes the card to a person. That is Trust showing up on the board: uncertain is not rounded up to done.

Pull, not push

Work is not assigned to a desk that will be occupied on Monday. A booting agent reads the board and takes the next card. The board is the durable state it wakes into, which is Memory. Nobody schedules the fleet. The fleet pulls.

Time as an event, not a box

Time still exists on the board, but as a wake, not a deadline. legion kanban defer puts a card down until a set time and takes it out of the working set until then. When the time passes, the card wakes its owner on its own.

legion kanban defer --id <card> --until 3d     # put it down; it wakes itself later
legion kanban undefer --id <card>              # wake it now, ahead of time

“Wake me on this in three days” replaces “due Friday,” because there is no Friday for an agent, only the next time it is running.

Done means verified

A card reaches Done through the verify gate, not an agent’s say-so. It carries acceptance criteria, bound to it as a spec, and legion verify checks the work against them one criterion at a time. If the agent decides the criteria themselves are wrong, it does not quietly build something else. It files a replan request and stops, and a human re-ratifies the criteria before the work goes on. The plan is not something an agent gets to edit on its own while claiming it followed it.