Concepts

By Dawn is a board where people describe work and AI agents do it. This page explains the few things it’s made of and how they fit together, so the rest of these docs and the app make sense. Each one links to the page that covers it in full.

Your organization and its projects

Organization. Your company or team in By Dawn. Everything belongs to one: its members, projects, tickets, pages and machines. You can belong to more than one and switch between them.

Member. A person in the organization. Each has a role. Owners and admins manage the organization, connect GitHub and pair machines, and everyone else works in its projects.

Team. A group of people who own work together, such as everyone on the mobile apps. A ticket can be owned by one team, and a team can work across several projects. See Teams.

Project. One board of work, such as a product or a service. Each project has a short prefix that starts its tickets’ IDs, like SAW in SAW-123. A coding project has repos, and its tickets change code. A project that isn’t for code is a board for research, docs, planning or design.

Repo. A git repository a project’s tickets work in, from GitHub, Azure DevOps or another git host. An agent works in its own copy of the repo, so tickets never get in each other’s way. See Repos.

The board and its tickets

Board. A project’s tickets, in columns from left to right, such as Backlog, Planning, Running, Review and Completed. Your team may have renamed or added some. A card moves along the board as its work moves on. Moving a card into the building column starts an agent on it. Board views in the sidebar, such as My tickets, Needs you and Running now, show the tickets that matter to you.

Ticket. One piece of work: a title, a description, and properties such as status, priority, assignee and labels. A ticket sits in exactly one column. Tickets are archived rather than deleted, so nothing disappears by accident.

Sub-ticket. A ticket with a parent, used to break bigger work down. Its ID shows its parent, such as SAW-123.1.

Epic and milestone. An epic is a larger piece of work made of many tickets, such as a feature. Its milestones split it into stages. You’ll find them under Epics & Milestones.

Cycle. A time-box for a project’s work, like a sprint. A project can plan in cycles or not. Release is a set of changes that ship together, with notes. They share Cycles & Releases in the sidebar, which is just Releases in a project without cycles.

Agents and missions

Agent. Claude Code, working on a ticket. It reads the ticket, plans, writes code in its own copy of the repo, runs the tests and opens a pull request. By Dawn calls one agent working on one ticket a worker, and one go at the ticket a run.

Machine. The computer an agent runs on: your own, in the desktop app, or a remote agent, a machine paired with the organization, such as a server that’s always on. Each machine signs in to Claude itself. See Remote agents and machines.

Mission. The steps a ticket goes through while an agent works on it, such as a plan you approve, tests that pass and a pull request that merges. By Dawn checks some steps itself, and a person decides others: the ticket waits for you at those. See Missions and templates.

Pull request. Where an agent’s work ends up for review. You review it in By Dawn’s Changes tab or on GitHub, and the ticket is done when it merges. See Pull requests.

Routine. Agent work that recurs on a schedule. Each run creates a ticket.

Where you work

Inbox. Everything waiting on you, such as an agent’s question or a plan to approve, in one list. See Inbox.

Docs. Your organization’s wiki: runbooks, decisions and specs, written by people and agents. See Docs.

Memory. Short rules, concepts and decisions. Agents are handed the ones that matter to each run, so you tell them something once.

Questions. Questions you ask about a project’s code. An agent answers them without changing anything.

Insights. Charts of how a project’s work is going.

For developers

To use By Dawn’s API, How By Dawn is organised explains the same ideas with the fields and calls that go with them, and Words we use defines each term.