Linear is your control room

Linear is where you and your agents talk. You write the ticket. They reply in comments and move the card across the board. You don’t watch a terminal — you read the ticket.

Every step reports back

As each step runs, it posts a comment on the ticket:

• the triage estimate (small, medium, large, or epic)
• what the research found
• the plan it’s going to follow
• a summary of what it implemented
• the verify and review results
• the pull request number and link
• the merge result, and the deploy

So the ticket becomes a full log of the work. You scroll the comments to see what happened, without opening a single file. (Comments are best-effort — a rare failed post is skipped, not retried.)

The card moves itself

You don’t drag the card after the first move. As the agent works, Catalyst mirrors each transition to your board — research, then planning, then in progress, then in review, then done. It keeps your board’s status in step with the work.

It reacts to what you change

The agents watch the ticket while they work:

• Change the priority and the queue re-ranks — bump a ticket to Urgent and it jumps the line.
• Move a ticket to Canceled (or Backlog or Duplicate) and the running worker stops.
• Add a comment and the agent sees it in the event stream.

One limit: the agents watch a ticket’s status, priority, and labels. They do not read edits you make to the description after work starts. To change the spec mid-run, cancel the ticket, fix it, and move it back to Todo.

It works the pull request for you

Once the PR is open, the agent doesn’t stop and wait. It loops until the PR is clean or it hits a human decision:

• answers automated review bots and makes the fixes they ask for
• fixes failing CI (the checks that run on every PR), up to three tries
• rebases the branch when it falls behind main
• merges once GitHub says the PR is clean, then sets the ticket to Done

It stops and tags the ticket needs-human when a person must decide. That means a human reviewer asked for changes, there’s a merge conflict, or a required approval is missing.

Your job

Write good tickets. Set priorities. The rest of the conversation happens in Linear comments — you read them, and you step in only when a ticket is tagged needs-human.

Next: See all your work.