Tickets and delegation

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A ticket is the unit of work Control Center tracks. It is deliberately a dumb artifact: a title, a body, a status, an owner and a place in a tree. It is not the thing agents execute against — agent work lives in conversations and the structured output of a run lives on the run log.

Assignment records ownership; it dispatches nothing

This is the single most important thing to get right about tickets.

Setting assignedAgentId writes a field and publishes a TicketAssigned domain event. That event is an audit and notification signal and a pipeline trigger. Assignment to an agent starts no run. There is no ticket dispatcher that watches assignedAgentId and wakes that agent.

The exception is a team: when assignedTeamId is set, TeamRoutingService dispatches the team leader with the operating protocol and roster.

If you want a specific agent to work on a ticket, you ask it in a conversation, or a pipeline step dispatches it, or another agent delegates to it. Assigning a ticket to an agent and waiting is the one thing that will never produce work.

Mirror and overlay

A ticket can be purely local or backed by an external tracker and it carries both on one row.

The mirror — provider, external key, URL, title, description, priority, labels, raw and normalized status, timestamps — is a cache when the ticket is remote. The remote is the source of truth there and a refresh rewrites the mirror wholesale.

The overlay — assignment, delegation, space link, parent, project, linked PRs — is Control Center-only. The tracker knows nothing about it and a refresh never touches it.

That split is what makes it safe to sync at all: a vendor pull can be destructive to the mirror without ever losing the orchestration metadata layered on top.

The lifecycle graph binds agents, not you

Statuses run backlog → open → inProgress → inReview → done, with blocked as a side loop and failed / cancelled as the other terminal states.

The transition graph is enforced only on the agent and automation path — MCP tools and reconcilers. An illegal transition there is logged and ignored, so a confused agent cannot walk a ticket backwards out of a terminal state.

Every user-driven change in the UI passes force: true and bypasses the graph entirely. A human may move a ticket to any status the picker lists — including reopening a terminal one. The picker does not offer failed; agents set that through fail_ticket. The graph is a guard rail for automation, not a rule about how work is allowed to go.

TicketWorkflowService owns every mutation through a single chokepoint that loads the row, asserts it belongs to the caller’s workspace and writes with an expected version so two concurrent edits cannot silently overwrite each other.

For the full status table, transitions, field list and relation kinds, see Ticket lifecycle.

Provenance: how a ticket came to exist

Every ticket has an originKind. The enum has five values — manual, pipelineStep, agentDelegation, externalSync, recovery — but only two are written today: manual (the default on createTicket, including delegated children) and externalSync (the sync engine, on a vendor pull). TicketWorkflowService.createTicket does not take an origin argument, so pipelineStep, agentDelegation and recovery never land on a row.

Guarded delegation

Delegation is where an agent creates work for another agent and it is the place privilege could leak, so the guards live server-side at a chokepoint rather than in prompt instructions.

delegate_task routes through TicketWorkflowService.delegateGuarded, which computes the child’s depth and root from the parent chain and then runs all four DelegationGuards checks: a hop that would exceed a depth cap of 3, a hop back to an agent already in the chain (cycle detection), an autonomy ceiling (the delegate’s effective level in the space must not exceed the delegator’s) and a budget envelope (delegation bills the delegator’s remaining hard-stop budget and cannot mint more). Production wiring supplies both resolver ports. Autonomy and budget skip when from_agent_id is omitted (unlimited / no-policy budget also passes). A refusal is thrown as a DelegationRefusedException whose message reaches the delegating agent verbatim — a loud denial, never a silent no-op.

delegate_ticket is the older, unguarded sibling: it calls createTicket directly and skips every guard. Prefer delegate_task.

Do not confuse the delegation depth cap (3, on delegate_task chains) with the built-in harness’s subagent nesting cap (2). They are different limits on different mechanisms.

Hierarchy, links and projects

Parent and sub-issue relationships live on tickets.parent_ticket_id, owned by setParent / clearParent. They are not ticket_links rows, so anything reading a ticket’s relations has to merge both sources.

ticket_links holds the directional edges between otherwise unrelated tickets:

Link type	Meaning
`blocks`	The source blocks the target
`relatesTo`	The two tickets are related (symmetric)
`duplicateOf`	The source is a duplicate of the target

A project is a workspace-scoped grouping of tickets toward a shared goal. Projects are Control Center-only and never sync to an external provider.

Collaborators

TicketCollaborator rows are how more than one principal is attached to a ticket, at a role of assignee, collaborator, or reviewer. Humans and agents are co-equal rows — a principalId plus a collaboratorType — with no sentinel value for “the user” and no foreign key to either table.

External sync

Control Center’s ticket is primary. Deleting a ticket is local only, so a vendor-backed ticket you delete is not deleted on the tracker and may reappear on the next sync. Collaborators and child tickets cascade.

Adapter credentials resolve from the server’s credential stores (a Linear key or GitHub token pasted in Settings is picked up on the next request; the environment only seeds those stores).

Tickets and pipelines

No pipeline node creates, completes or cancels tickets — the palette has no such step and the engine does not call TicketWorkflowService. A pipeline trigger can still fire on TicketAssigned, TicketCompleted, TicketFailed, or TicketCancelled (those four are the ticket events EventPayloadMapper actually maps). There is no pipelineRunId column on the ticket; pipeline coupling lives on the agent run log.