What is a Cabinet?
Agents
Tasks

Tasks

A task is the smallest unit of work in Cabinet. One prompt, one agent, one run, one output. Tasks are the thing routines schedule, agents dispatch, and you create from the kanban board.

Where tasks come from

Tasks land on the board through three channels:

  • You — click + New Task on the kanban, type a prompt, pick an agent.
  • Routines — every scheduled run shows up as a task with the routine name attached.
  • Other agents — a lead proposes a LAUNCH_TASK, you approve it, it lands on the board.

The five lanes

Cabinet's default board has five lanes that mirror how a real team's work moves:

LaneMeaningWho acts next
InboxJust landed. Not assigned, not started.You triage.
Your turnThe agent finished and needs your call (review, approve, decide).You.
RunningAn agent is actively working it.The agent.
Just finishedOutput written, not yet acknowledged.You skim.
ArchiveDone. Kept for history and search.Nobody.

Drag cards across lanes. Status changes are git-tracked so you can see who moved what when.

A task card

Every card shows:

  • Title — what the task is.
  • Agent — who's running it, with their emoji.
  • Trigger — Manual / Job / Heartbeat / Dispatched-by.
  • Status pills — running, waiting on you, blocked, done.
  • Effort — model + reasoning level used for this run.
  • Output links — pages this task wrote.

Click a card for the full transcript, the prompt, and the diff of every page it touched.

Creating a task

The fastest way is the global hotkey ⌘N from anywhere in the app. You get a small composer:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Task                                    │
│  ─────────────────────────────────────   │
│  Brief 10 competitors before Friday     │
│                                          │
│  → Research Lead   ▾  claude-opus  ▾    │
│  ◯ low  ● medium  ◯ high                │
│                                          │
│  [ Add to Inbox ]   [ Run now ]         │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Pick an agent, pick a model + effort, choose Add to Inbox (queued for later) or Run now (the agent starts immediately).

Filters and views

The board has three views:

  • Kanban — the lanes above. Default.
  • List — flat sortable table. Best for triage of a busy day.
  • Schedule — calendar view of upcoming routines + heartbeats.

And these filters:

  • By agent — see only what one agent is doing.
  • By trigger — Manual, Job, Heartbeat.
  • By status — Running, Waiting, Done.
  • By cabinet visibility — current folder only, current cabinet, or all.

Approvals

Tasks proposed by another agent show up with an approval pill instead of a normal status. You approve them inline, swap the model or effort, or reject. See Conversations & approvals.

What a task writes

Every task writes at least one of:

  1. A page — the output, in a folder you (or the agent) chose.
  2. A memory entry — for the agent's own future runs.
  3. A transcript — kept under .cabinet-state/ for audit.

If it writes a page, it's durable. If it only writes memory or a transcript, it's invisible to your future self. Default to writing a page when the work matters.

Read on