The board
Volli’s board has five fixed columns, and you can’t add, rename, or remove
them. They track whose turn it is with a ticket, not a workflow you configure.
The columns
Section titled “The columns”Backlog. Work you’ve written down but aren’t committing to yet. Nothing runs here.
Todo. Work you intend to do next. Nothing runs here either.
Doing. An agent’s column. Moving a ticket here creates its worktree and starts its session. A ticket in Doing has, or recently had, an agent working on it.
Needs Review. The agent has stopped and handed back to you. Read the change set here and decide.
Done. Finished. Volli keeps the worktree and branch around.
Backlog and Todo are yours, Doing belongs to an agent, and Needs Review is the handoff back. Most of the movement you’ll see happens across that Doing and Needs Review boundary.
List view
Section titled “List view”The board button next to the ticket count switches between Board and List. Board is the kanban layout above; List lays the same tickets out as rows instead of cards, grouped by the same five columns. Both views share the same filtering and sort order, so switching between them never changes which tickets you see or the order they’re in.
Filtering and sorting
Section titled “Filtering and sorting”The board header carries a Priority and, once a project has labels, a Label filter chip. Each opens a checklist, and you can select more than one value in it: picking two priorities shows tickets matching either. Clear appears once a filter is active and resets it.
The sort control next to the filters picks how each column orders its tickets: Manual (the order you left them in by dragging), Priority, Created, Updated, or Title. Every key but Manual has an independent Ascending/Descending toggle; Manual ignores it, since a drag order only goes one way. Switching to a different key and back to Manual restores the hand-arranged order, because sorting by a field never touches it.
Free-text search isn’t in this header. It’s part of the command palette
(⌘K), which searches tickets and sessions across every project.
What moves a ticket
Section titled “What moves a ticket”Three things move tickets, and they don’t have equal authority.
You. Drag a card, or run
volli ticket move yourself.
An agent. Calling volli session done or volli session blocked from
inside its session is how a finished agent lands its ticket in Needs Review.
Automation. Volli’s own lifecycle handling, reacting to a session that exited, stalled, or was interrupted.
Manual moves win
Section titled “Manual moves win”If you move a ticket while its agent is still finishing, your move stands. A lifecycle event that arrives afterward won’t undo it.
For example: pull a ticket out of Doing because the agent is going the wrong way, and the agent’s own “I’m done” signal landing a second later won’t drag the ticket into Needs Review behind you.
The ticket context menu
Section titled “The ticket context menu”Right-click a card for the fastest way to act on it without a drag or the CLI. The menu offers:
- Move to a column: the same move as a drag, without the drag.
- Priority: set it to low, medium, or high. The current priority carries a checkmark.
- Resume last session: shown only when the ticket has a resumable session. Reopens it in the ticket’s workspace.
- Remove worktree…: deletes the worktree’s folder on disk and keeps the branch. Disabled while any of the ticket’s sessions are still running. If the worktree has uncommitted work, Volli asks again before it lets you discard it.
- Archive: see Archiving below.
Tickets
Section titled “Tickets”A ticket carries a title, a Markdown body, a priority, labels, and a display
ID like VC-12. The body matters most once an agent is involved: it’s the
scope of the work and the instruction the agent starts from.
Priority is low, medium, or high. Labels are project-scoped records with their own colors, so the same label means the same thing across every ticket in a project.
Set priority from a card’s context menu, or from the Properties tab of the ticket’s workspace. Labels have no context-menu entry; set them from the ticket workspace’s Properties tab, or when you create the ticket, from the composer’s Labels chip. Typing a name that doesn’t exist yet and pressing Enter creates that label for the project, so there’s no separate “manage labels” screen.
Comments
Section titled “Comments”Every ticket workspace has a comment feed under its Activity section. Post
one from the box at the bottom (⌘Enter submits) and it renders as Markdown.
You can edit or delete your own comments; an edited comment is marked
“edited” next to its timestamp.
Each comment is attributed to whoever posted it: you, or a specific harness (Claude Code, Codex, and so on) when a session posts one. Only your own comments carry edit and delete controls. Volli doesn’t let you alter what an agent posted on its own behalf.
History
Section titled “History”Every ticket keeps an append-only event log. Volli adds entries and never rewrites them, so the history stays accurate even after the ticket’s title, body, or column changes.
Each event records who caused it: you, a session, or automation. Volli derives that attribution itself, so an agent can’t log something as though you did it.
Read a ticket’s history with
volli ticket events.
Archiving
Section titled “Archiving”Archiving a ticket takes it off the board and keeps everything else: its history, its branch, and its worktree. Reach every archived ticket in a project from the archive icon in the board header. From there, Restore puts a ticket back on the board, and Delete permanently removes it and its full history for good. It’s the one genuinely destructive action in this flow, and the only one that asks you to confirm it can’t be undone.
Auto-archive
Section titled “Auto-archive”Volli watches every worktree ticket’s pull request in the background (it
needs gh, the GitHub CLI, on your PATH) and prompts you to wrap one up in
two cases: its PR merged, in any column, or it’s sat in Done for 14 days with
no open PR. Neither case archives anything by itself. Automation only ever
prompts here, the same de-escalate-only rule as the rest of the board; you
still click through it.
That prompt shows up in the ticket’s workspace, on the Properties tab, under Pull request: the button that normally reads “Push updates” or “View PR” changes to Archive & clean. Clicking it removes the worktree and then archives the ticket, in that order. If the worktree still has uncommitted work, it refuses the same way Remove worktree… does, leaving the ticket on the board for you to resolve.
Two ways to turn a prompt down. Keep pins the ticket so neither case ever prompts again, until you unpin it. Dismiss just clears the current prompt; it’s offered again the next time you launch Volli. Both live in the same menu as Archive & clean.
Volli checks every worktree ticket about once a minute. If gh fails (not
installed, not authenticated, offline), Volli backs off: it doubles the wait
after each consecutive failed check, up to 15 minutes, then retries
automatically without surfacing an error toast.