Initiatives
An initiative is a planning artefact that owns a tree of child briefs. Use one when the work doesn't fit in a single brief — a multi-stage project, a quarterly theme, an investigation that will spawn several follow-ups. Same audit + state machine discipline as briefs, but with its own lifecycle.
Where initiatives come from
- A planning form intake (public, PM-friendly).
- Manual creation from Project → Initiatives → New.
- The API (initiative endpoints mirror brief endpoints).
State machine
Seven states. Two terminals. Cancelled is the universal escape hatch from any non-terminal state.
Initial state. The PM is still composing.
AI pass cleans up problem statement and proposed approach.
A human edits, splits the work, signs off the structure.
Ready for an approver. Child briefs are not claimable yet.
Child briefs become claimable. Workers can start work.
All children done. Initiative auto-closes.
Terminal escape hatch from any non-terminal state.
The work-tree
Once an initiative is in human_review, the reviewer can split the proposed
approach into child briefs (drag, edit, reorder). Each child brief lives in inbox and becomes claimable only when the parent initiative reaches accepted. From that point on, the children flow through the regular brief
lifecycle — workflow rules, assignments, the coding agent, reviews, the lot.
Rollup status
The initiative shows a live rollup of its children: how many are open / in progress / review /
done / cancelled. When the last open child closes, the initiative auto-transitions to done.
Initiatives are optional. Plenty of projects work fine with just briefs + labels. Reach for an initiative when you genuinely need a parent record with its own approval gate.