How the ticket queue works

Three queues per agent, a filename that carries the status, and a state machine in torta.json.

A ticket is a markdown file. Its queue is the folder it sits in; its status is part of its filename.

Three queues per agent

Every agent home has .workflow/ with three folders:

Queue	What is in it
`todo`	work waiting to be picked up
`wip`	the one ticket the agent is working now
`done`	finished work

Torta refuses to fill an occupied wip: one ticket at a time.

Tickets are built in a .staging folder and renamed into a queue.

The filename is the record

Every ticket file is named:

<type>.<three-word-name>.<STATUS>.md

Everything is lowercase except the status. The assignee lives in the frontmatter, not the name. The types are feature, fix, chore, refactor, adhoc, epic and hotfix.

A status change is a rename, and the board is watching directories.

The frontmatter

Eight fields are required on every ticket: status, project, type, title, assignee, author, date and repo.

The body is section-based, each section with a line budget. A feature carries User story, Acceptance criteria, Motivation, Proposed change, Impact and risks and Verification. A ticket is capped at 300 non-blank lines, excluding the append-only ## History block.

The full list is in the workflow schema.

The state machine

torta.json carries a statuses list: what each status means, who holds it, and what it may become next. The default workflow has 22, and a feature normally takes this path:

REVIEW to APPROVED to WIP to CODE_REVIEW to FOR_QA to STG to FOR_DEPLOY to DEPLOYED to DONE.

The ones that stop and ask you are marked userFacing; see approvals.

The history block

Every transition appends a row to the ticket’s ## History section: when it happened, what it moved from and to, and whose home it ran from. The block is append-only and has a 40 line budget of its own.

The event log

.torta/events.jsonl records what happened: transition, session_start, session_stop, approval, interrupt, lease_reclaim, budget_breach, watch_start, watch_stop, dispatch and pane_deliver.

The log is derived: delete it mid-run and nothing changes. The board draws from directory listings and torta.json.