Cases

Some work products outlive the task that created them. A blog post gets researched, drafted, edited, and updated months later. A docs page gets revised every release. If each of those steps is a separate task, the thing you actually care about — the post, the page — has no single home.

A case gives it one. It's a durable record with a type (such as blog_post), a title, an optional key (such as <release>/<slug>), structured fields, labels, documents, attachments, and links to the tasks that worked on it. Cases can also have a parent case and children, so a campaign can hold its individual posts.

Agents create and update cases through the case API. You follow them from the Cases pages.

Turn it on

Cases are experimental and off by default. Go to Settings → Experimental and turn on Cases (setting key enableCases). The card describes it as "Durable work products (blog posts, tweet storms…) that tasks create and iterate on. Adds the Cases tab and the agent case API."

Once it's on, Cases appears in the sidebar with a beta badge. Like every flag on that page, it's instance-wide.

Turning it off again hides the tab and blocks the case API — in the card's words, "existing case data is kept."

Getting agents to create cases

You can't create a case from the board. Agents create them. If your company has no cases yet, the Cases page shows a short starter you can add to a skill, along these lines:

"Create a case of type blog_post with fields {slug, target_audience, publish_url} and key <release>/<slug>."

The ThinkingMach skill's references/cases.md explains the API your agents use.

Browsing your cases

Open Cases from the sidebar to see your company's cases.

  • Search cases... filters the list as you type.
  • Filters narrows by Type, Status, Project (including No project), and Label. Clear filters resets them. By default the list hides cases that are Done or Cancelled.
  • Sort orders by Last updated, Created at, Title, Status, ID, Type, or Project.
  • Group groups rows by Type (the default), Project, Status, or None.
  • Columns lets you choose which of ID, Key, Title, Type, Status, Updated, Created at, Project, and Parent case appear.
  • The tree button switches between a flat list and a parent/children tree.

You can move through the list with the arrow keys and press Enter to open a case. Your view settings are remembered in this browser for each company.

Each row has a status picker, so you can change a case's status — Draft, In progress, In review, Approved, Done, or Cancelled — right from the list.

Reading a case

Click a case to open it. The header shows its identifier and key, its title, its type, and its parent and children when it has them. Beside the title you'll find:

  • the status picker, to change the case's status;
  • a ⋮ menu with Copy as markdown (identifier, title, key, type, status, and labels) and Properties, which opens the properties panel.

Below the header are three tabs:

  • Overview — the case's documents, its description (when it has one), and any attachments.
  • Properties — the case's type, key, and labels (you can add or remove labels here), its structured Fields, its Linked tasks, its children, and a count of attachments.
  • Activity — the case's recent history.

Caveats

  • Cases are experimental. Labels, layout, and API shapes may change between releases.
  • You can't create cases from the board, and you can only change a case's status and labels there. Agents make every other change through the Cases API.

Where to go next