WorkItem

A unit of work — task, story, bug, epic, spike, or chore. The primary work-tracking primitive in processkit.

ID prefix	BACK
State machine	workitem
MCP server	workitem-management
Skill	workitem-management (Layer 2)

State machine

backlog → in-progress → review → done
              ↕
           blocked

All states can transition to cancelled. done and cancelled are terminal.

Fields

Required

Field	Type	Description
title	string (1–200)	Short, actionable title
state	string	Current state

Optional

Field	Type	Description
description	string	Long-form description, acceptance criteria
type	enum	task · story · bug · epic · spike · chore (default: task)
priority	enum	critical · high · medium · low
assignee	ACTOR-*	Responsible actor
parent	BACK-*	Parent work item (for subtasks / epics)
children	BACK-*[]	Child work item IDs
blocks	BACK-*[]	Items this one blocks
blocked_by	BACK-*[]	Items blocking this one
related_decisions	DEC-*[]	Decisions that motivated or govern this item
scope	string	Scope ID (sprint, milestone, release)
estimate	object	Freeform effort estimate
started_at	datetime	Set automatically on first in-progress transition
completed_at	datetime	Set automatically on done or cancelled

Example

---
apiVersion: processkit.projectious.work/v1
kind: WorkItem
metadata:
  id: BACK-20260411_0900-BoldVale-fts5-full-text-search
  created: '2026-04-11T09:00:00Z'
spec:
  title: Add FTS5 full-text search to SQLite index
  state: backlog
  type: story
  priority: medium
  description: |
    Implement FTS5 trigram tokeniser in index.py so agents can search
    entity body text, not just frontmatter fields.
  related_decisions:
    - DEC-20260409_1200-SwiftPeak-sqlite-for-index
---

Notes

• All state transitions are auto-logged via event-log — no manual log call needed.
• Use parent / children to model epics and subtasks; keep the epic type epic and subtask types task or story.
• scope is a free string; bind to a Scope entity via binding-management when you need richer scope tracking (dates, goals, state).
• Query by state, type, priority, or assignee via query_workitems.