Planning and tracking agent work beyond tickets

Origin. On September 28, 2026, Dru asked for this as part of the Agentic Software area (path agentic-coding), not a separate area. His working hunch: teams may quickly move from tickets to delegating larger swathes of functionality. Research the claim rather than assuming it is already standard.

Questions. How do teams represent scope and intent at feature or subsystem scale? How do humans delegate and coordinate parallel agents, know what each is changing or proposing, intervene ergonomically, reconcile conflicting changes, and keep their mental model of the software current as it evolves? Where do specs, execution plans, checkpoints, diff/preview interfaces, versioned decisions, event logs, acceptance tests and ownership fit?

Evidence to seek. Firsthand production workflows with sample plans, task boundaries and human touchpoints; studies on parallelism and review load; failures in context drift, hidden changes, duplicated work and coordination; tools/interfaces that demonstrably reduce those problems. Distinguish demos and work-in-progress from maintained shipped systems. Connect to review autonomy and cost and human attention.

Administrative correction. A standalone area was created in misunderstanding and marked superseded. All substantive work belongs here.