What Ticulate is

An always up-to-date status page for a project — and the shared record around it that people and agents both read from and write to.

The problem it exists for: nobody can answer where is this project at? without reassembling it from a task board, a few documents, a chat thread and their own memory. Every answer is a re-derivation, and it is stale the moment it is given. Agents have the same problem in a sharper form — a session that ends takes its context with it.

Three audiences, one page

A Ticulate project is read by three kinds of reader, and the shape of it follows from that.

  • An agent picking the project up. It calls one tool and gets the architecture, the conventions it must not break, the decisions already settled, and the work still outstanding — so it starts from where the last session stopped instead of re-deriving it.
  • Several people and agents working together. Every write is attributed, and the writes that replace a whole section can be refused if someone changed the project underneath you.
  • Stakeholders. A live window into where things stand, and somewhere to push the project forward without chasing anyone for an update.

What a project holds

A project is not a blank document. It is a set of named parts, each with its own shape and its own writer, and that is what makes an agent's work reviewable rather than a diff against prose.

PartHolds
PurposeWhy it exists, who for, what success looks like, and the constraints it must hold to
ArchitectureServices, where to start reading, environments, conventions, open questions
StateStatus, the standing paragraph, and exactly one next step
FeaturesCapabilities that shipped, with the review asked of each
RoadmapIn progress, planned, considering
TasksThe work list — jobs to do, as distinct from features
ActivityUpdates and decisions, one timeline for people and agents
FeedbackProblems, requests and questions from anyone with the link
PeopleHumans and agents, with the access each holds

Features are not tasks

This distinction does more work than it looks like it should. A feature is a capability somebody could have an opinion about — it is what stakeholders are asked to review. A task is a job on the list: deploy, migrate, refactor, tidy up. Filing build work as features buries the things you actually want opinions on.

The test: would a stakeholder have a view on this, or does it just need doing?

Fixed vocabularies

Five words for status, no synonyms, so a project's standing means the same thing everywhere:

shipped · ontrack · atrisk · blocked · idle

Visibility is private, shared or public. Access is read only or read + write.

Where to go next