Initiatives & Bugs
Initiatives hold planned work: a project, feature, customer request, or engineering program that needs a brief, an owner, and a place on the roadmap. Bugs hold defects and incidents. Both are briefs that people and agents can build from.
Create an initiative or bug
Select Write in the sidebar or the Desktop title bar. The create dialog opens over the current page, so you keep your place. Set the status, parent initiative, owner, assignees, and teams. If you belong to only one team, it is preselected.
When the brief is still rough, choose Writer in the create dialog. Writer Mode asks about the problem, scope, constraints, proposal, and risks, and turns your answers into a draft description.
Write a brief worth building from
In spec-driven development, the initiative is the spec. Write down the problem, the expected outcome, constraints, important links, and open decisions. For a bug, include enough for someone to reproduce, fix, and review it.
To refine an existing initiative, bug, or todo, open it and select Enter writer mode. The session starts from the current title and description.
Break large work into child initiatives
Nest initiatives under a parent when one brief is too large. The roadmap table shows the hierarchy, and a parent shows progress based on its completed or cancelled children.
Keep initiatives for the bigger pieces of planned work. Smaller execution details, such as individual pull requests, are captured from your tools as completed tasks. Initiative fields covers filters, grouping, and actions.
Initiative statuses
Initiative statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Idea | Early concept or intake item that still needs shaping. |
| Open | Work exists, but has not been selected for active planning. |
| Planned | Approved or selected for upcoming work. |
| In Progress | Someone is actively working on it. |
| Review | Waiting for review, triage, or human confirmation. |
| Blocked | Waiting on a dependency, decision, missing input, or external issue. |
| Completed | Finished and included in history, recaps, and analytics. |
| Cancelled | Closed without continuing in its current form. |
Complete an initiative or bug
Mark the item Completed to close it. Depending on the Completed work setting in your Preferences, closing it can also add a completed task to your recap. Captured work explains how recap decides.
Choose the right work type
- Feature requests and suggestions that are not accepted yet belong in ideas.
- Recurring work without a finish line, such as security reviews, fits ongoing work.
- Research, decisions, and diagrams that need their own page belong in an attached document.
Using Jira or Linear?
If an issue already lives in a connected tracker, keep its status and assignment there. Create an initiative only when the issue needs roadmap context beyond what the tracker holds.