Small pieces of work
under every roadmap item.
A roadmap item says what you want to build. Work items say what has to be done to get there: a title, a description, acceptance criteria and the files involved. Each one is small enough to finish in a sitting, or to hand to a coding agent.
What a work item
contains
Enough detail that you can pick it up in a month and still know what finished looks like. The same detail is what a coding agent needs, so a work item you wrote for yourself is ready to delegate if you change your mind.
- ›Acceptance criteria are a checklist you tick off as you go
- ›Scope lists the files and directories the work touches
- ›Notes record what you learned between attempts, and go along if you delegate again
- ›Size is single pass, multi-step or spike. Multi-step means break it down further, and a spike produces a plan instead of code.
- ›Priority runs from urgent to low, and you can drag items into the order you want
- ›Sub-tasks nest one level under a parent work item
Do it yourself,
or hand it off
Most work items you will do yourself and tick off. For the ones you would rather give away, every work item has a Delegate button. Pick where it should go and Shipchart writes the prompt from what is already on the work item. Delegation is part of the Builder plan.
- ›The description, acceptance criteria, scope and notes are assembled into the prompt for you
- ›Send it to GitHub Copilot, a Linear agent or your own shipchart worker
- ›Status follows the delegation: delegated when it starts, in review when the pull request opens, done when it merges
- ›If the result is wrong, add a note and delegate again with shipchart work delegate --note
- ›A task you send to the worker without a work item gets one created for it, so the list stays complete
Where work items
come from
You can type every work item in by hand, and plenty of people will. Shipchart can also draft them from a roadmap item, from a production error, or from a Deep Plan run over your codebase. They all end up in the same list.
- ›Each work item records where it came from, and you can filter the list by source
- ›An error from Sentry or Bugsnag becomes a work item with the error details attached
- ›Deep Plan reads your repository through the local worker and fills in scope and acceptance criteria
- ›Work item generation uses AI credits, and you review the draft before anything is saved
- ›The MCP server has tools to list, create, update and delegate work items
One list across
every project
The worklist page shows open work for every project you run, so you can see what is waiting without opening each one. If a project has GitHub or Linear connected, its issues appear in the same view as your work items.
- ›Sits next to Linear and GitHub Issues and does not replace them
- ›One page for the whole portfolio, or the Worklist tab inside a project
- ›Active, backlog and completed views, with search and filters for size and source
- ›Each row shows how many acceptance criteria are ticked
- ›Also available from the CLI with shipchart work list --all, and through MCP
Write down the next
small thing to do
Shipchart is free for up to 4 projects, with no time limit and no credit card.