This week I was adding an issue board to Clumsies, my memory infrastructure for coding agents. The first version seemed tidy: when an agent received a prompt, a hook would open or advance an issue; when the run stopped, another hook would move it toward completion. The board could stay current without anyone maintaining it.
Then I asked what a Stop event actually proves. It proves only that a process ended. It cannot tell whether the issue was solved, abandoned, blocked, or merely paused. The implementation had turned telemetry into judgment.
The same mistake appeared elsewhere in the prototype. The board displayed labels such as “No recent activity” without a state model that could produce them reliably. They looked informative, but I could not explain what fact made them true. Once I asked that question, the label had to go.
My correction was not to add cleverer heuristics. The agent has the prompt, the conversation, and the result, so it can propose the semantic transition. On input, it decides whether to continue an existing issue or create a new one, then upserts that issue as in progress. On exit, it can request closure. The person approves or rejects that request.
This changed how I think about interaction in agent applications. I had started with a conventional board, which implies that people should open forms, edit fields, and drag cards around to maintain state. That is the wrong burden here. The user should state needs and corrections in natural language. The agent turns them into structured work. The person stays at the narrow boundary where a transition needs approval.
The interface became smaller once I accepted that split. It needs a global issue ID that can be copied into a prompt, a way for the agent to retrieve issues, and an approval control for closure. It does not need an editor for every field. Even the timestamps collapsed to opened and closed; duration can be read from them instead of synthesized as another metric.
A hook can observe that a run ended. The board should not claim that the work ended with it.