Chapter 3
Tasks and planning
A board per project, commits that close cards, and release notes derived from what actually shipped.
5 sections · Chapter 3 of 8
Most teams keep their work in one tool and their code in another, and spend a surprising amount of energy keeping the two in sync by hand. Someone finishes a feature, pushes it, and then remembers to go and drag a card. At release time someone else scrolls through a month of commits trying to reconstruct what changed.
The board in USourceControl is not trying to replace a full project management suite. It exists because it sits next to the commits, and that adjacency buys two things nothing else can: a card can be closed by the commit that finished it, and a release's changelog can be derived from the cards its commits closed.
This chapter covers the board itself, the link between commits and cards, how a changelog gets built out of that link, and the two AI-assisted paths in and out: speaking tasks into existence, and handing them to a coding agent.
In this chapter
- 3.1The boardTo Do, Doing, Done, and Blocked, in the desktop app and on the web, backed by the same rows.
- 3.2Linking commits to tasksMention a card with #12, finish it with closes #12, and let the board keep up with the work.
- 3.3Changelogs from tasksA release's notes are the tasks its commits closed since the last release, not a list of commits.
- 3.4Voice captureSay what needs doing, read the transcript, tick the cards you want. Paid plans.
- 3.5Handing tasks to a coding agentCopy a prompt that tells an agent what to build and lets it move the cards as it works.
Summary
The board is four columns and a card, which is all a board needs to be. What makes it worth using is what sits next to it: commits that close cards with closes #12, and a changelog that comes out of those closures rather than out of somebody's memory on release day.
The distinction to hold on to is intent versus fact. Drag cards freely — the board is allowed to be aspirational. The release notes are built from commits, so they stay true regardless.
Both AI paths keep a person in the loop by design: voice capture proposes and you accept, and an agent's prompt is shown to you before it is copied.
Next: turning a commit into something a player can actually run.