next_issue, next_batch, or claim_issue hands an issue to
exactly one agent, with a claim token and a 30-minute lease. Everything else follows
from the lease.
How it works
1
Claim → lease
The response carries the claim token, the branch to work under, and the exact
expiry.
2
Renew or lose it
Only
heartbeat and checkpoint renew — comments and status edits don’t. Stall,
and the reclaimer frees the issue within minutes.3
Checkpoint = handoff
It survives release and reclaim; the next agent, any runtime, resumes from it
instead of restarting.
4
Writes are fenced
Finishing requires the live lease. A superseded agent’s late writes are rejected,
not merged.
Unheld
doing is claimable. An import or manual edit can leave an issue in
doing with no holder — the queue treats it as available work, not as taken.What the Dash shows
Pills:
claimed — lease live now · doing — unheld · resumed — has a checkpoint.
Next steps
Dependency-driven dispatch
How the graph decides what gets handed out, and in what order.
Review workflow
The optional acceptance gate — a review is claimed under the same lease.