Atono — Product Map

A semantic model of Atono for AI agents. Built from a full crawl of all ~69 pages of https://docs.atono.io (July 2026). This is not a link index — https://docs.atono.io/llms.txt already provides that. This document explains what Atono is, how its concepts relate, and the rules that govern them, so an agent can reason about Atono without re-reading the docs.

Last updated for the July 28, 2026 release (Story assistant, Tags, epic Activities/version history, bulk add-to-epic). Release history: Feb 18 → Apr 1 → May 14 → June 29 → July 28, 2026.

Editorial rules for this document: one home per fact. Limits live in §10, AI gates in §5, plan availability in §11. Everywhere else points rather than repeats, because a number duplicated in four sections is a number that will be updated in one.

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1. What Atono is, in one paragraph

Atono is a product engineering platform that keeps product context connected to the work it relates to, so that humans and AI agents operate from the same context. It spans the full loop — Plan → Build → Deploy → Measure — in one system: planning (stories, epics, timelines), delivery (workflows, Scrum/Kanban), release control (feature flags), and outcomes (usage engagement data), with the results feeding back into planning.

Two terms an agent must keep distinct, because the product uses both:

• Product context — the category noun. The preserved record of what the product is supposed to do and why, plus the decisions, constraints, and history needed to apply it. This is the term to use when describing what Atono is for.
• Product Knowledge — the Atono feature name for where that context lives: the Glossary plus AI Context. Use it when naming the feature, never as a substitute for the category noun.

The docs' own framing: "AI is helping teams move faster than ever, but speed alone doesn't create alignment." And the load-bearing claim: "AI can accelerate work, but only when it has access to accurate context."

Why this matters for positioning

The competitive reality is a stack, not a product: Jira/Linear (work tracking) + LaunchDarkly (flags) + Amplitude/Pendo (engagement). Atono's argument is that these are the same system artificially split apart, and that the split is what destroys context — which is now expensive, because AI agents consume context as their primary input.

Consolidating that stack is the budget the purchase comes out of, not the thesis. The thesis is the context layer: consolidation is generally a feature of winners rather than the reason a market forms. An agent describing Atono should lead with the context argument and treat "replaces four tools" as the commercial consequence.

Note on adjacent categories: Atono is not a knowledge base or a documentation tool, and "we need a knowledge base" is an explicit mis-fit signal. Knowledge bases store information; Atono maintains the relationships between decisions, intent, constraints, behavior, and implementation. Do not describe Confluence or Notion as the competitive set.

The structural proof is that the story is the hub of the entire data model. A story is simultaneously: the unit of work, the control surface for the feature flag, the anchor for usage analytics, and the container for AI context. In a conventional stack those four live in four products. That's the whole thesis, expressed as a schema.

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2. The mental model — how the pieces relate

WORKSPACE  ({name}.atono.io — permanent, unchangeable)
│
├── PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE ─── the feature name for where product context lives.
│                         Two halves, stored at different levels:
│                         (a) Glossary of Concepts — workspace-level, below
│                         (b) AI Context — item-level, on each story/bug
│                         └── fed to AI via MCP (atono_get_glossary,
│                             atono_get_ai_context) or TSV export
│
├── GLOSSARY OF CONCEPTS (one per workspace) ── half (a) of Product Knowledge
│
├── EPIC (groups ≤100 stories under one goal; a story lives in ≤1 epic)
│   │   has its own Activities list + version history (Jul 2026);
│   │   stories bulk-added from Everything
│   └── STORY ◄──────────────── the hub of the model
│       ├── User story ("As a [persona], I want to [action] so that [benefit]")
│       ├── Acceptance criteria (nestable parent/child; individually addressable by URL)
│       ├── Additional content (freeform)
│       ├── Size (XXS…XXL)  ── "Size it for me" (AI)
│       ├── Subtasks (checklist; own 4-state status)
│       ├── FEATURE FLAG ──── controls this story's rollout, from the story itself
│       ├── FEATURE ENGAGEMENT ── real usage data for this story, in the story
│       ├── AI CONTEXT ──── DESIGN / INVESTIGATION / SUMMARY
│       │                   half (b) of Product Knowledge
│       ├── STORY ASSISTANT ── conversational AI authoring; feeds DESIGN decisions
│       │                      back to AI context
│       ├── Tags (key:value; shared with bugs & epics; ≤30/item)
│       ├── Comments (general / inline / per-AC), Attachments, Activities, Version history
│       └── Linked items ◄──► bidirectional relations to other stories/bugs
│
├── BUG (parallel to story; separate lane so issues don't disrupt feature work)
│   ├── Summary / Repro steps / Expected / Actual
│   ├── Risk rating (Probability × Impact = 1–25) ── "Rate it for me" (AI)
│   ├── Reporter, Affected environments, Tags
│   └── (same subtasks/comments/attachments/activities/AI context as stories)
│
├── TEAM (≤50 per workspace)  ── Scrum or Kanban · Public or Private
│   └── WORKFLOW (4–25 steps in exactly 4 categories)
│       └── To do │ In progress │ Done │ Won't do
│
├── PLANNING OVERLAYS (all attach to stories; parallel, not nested)
│   ├── Product theme ── strategic grouping ("why") — stories only
│   ├── Timebox ─────── time-bound grouping ("when"), lives on a Timeline
│   ├── Sprint ─────── Scrum-only scheduled iteration
│   ├── Release ─────── a dated milestone marker, workspace-global
│   └── Tag ─────────── key:value label; the only overlay spanning stories, bugs & epics
│
└── ENVIRONMENTS (dev / tst / stage / prod) ── scope flags + bug reports;
                                              carry Environment Keys

The single most important relationship: the story is where work, rollout control, usage outcome, and AI context converge. Nothing else in the model does that.

The second most important, and the one agents get wrong: Product Knowledge is not a container that sits next to the story. It is a name for two things at two levels — the workspace Glossary and the per-item AI Context. Asked "what is Product Knowledge in Atono," the correct answer names both.

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3. The four workflow categories (universal spine)

Every story and bug on a team workflow moves through a team-customized workflow whose steps roll up to exactly four categories. These categories are hard-coded; the steps within them are not.

Rules an agent should know:

• 4–25 steps total; steps have name, color, order, and per-type applicability (story/bug/both).
• Items may move backward or skip steps; paths need not be linear.
• Recategorizing a step only counts time after the change.
• "Won't do" is consistently excluded: epic progress bars, subtask meters, burndown, search results.

Scope boundary: this model governs team workflows only. The two pre-team intake lanes (Story refinement, Bug triage — §4.6) have their own fixed step sequences and are not customizable. Do not assume the 4–25 step rule or the one-step-per-category rule applies to them.

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4. The distinctive concepts (what makes Atono not Jira)

These are the parts a generic work-tracker mental model will get wrong. If an agent only internalizes one section, it should be this one.

4.1 Feature flags live inside stories

Flags are created, configured, and toggled from the story header — not from a separate flag console. This is the inverse of LaunchDarkly's model.

• One flag can span multiple stories (when new work extends existing functionality).
• Adding a flagged story to a team's backlog automatically grants that team Flag User permissions (if no other team holds them). Backlog membership confers flag control.
• The entire flag status taxonomy is oriented toward answering "is this flag safe to delete?" — flags are treated as having a lifecycle bounded by the work that created them, not as permanent infrastructure. This is a genuinely different philosophy from standalone flag tools.

Full model: §9.

4.2 Feature engagement lives inside stories

The usage graph for a feature renders within the story that built it — no external analytics tool. Ships in "In progress" (below the ACs) and moves to the top when the story is "Done," so the story becomes its own outcome report. Closes the Plan→Measure loop in place.

4.3 AI context is a first-class field

A structured layer on every story/bug where AI agents persist their own working context across sessions, in three tabs, each independently version-controlled:

• DESIGN — product/scope decisions made during AI-assisted authoring (tradeoffs, deferred items)
• INVESTIGATION — research findings, relevant files/endpoints, open questions
• SUMMARY — what was added/changed/removed, test updates, behavior changes

This is the mechanism behind the whole positioning. It's not a notes field — it's durable agent memory attached to the work item, readable by the next agent or human. It is also half (b) of Product Knowledge.

4.4 The Glossary (half (a) of Product Knowledge)

One glossary per workspace. Built by crawling your documentation URLs or uploading a TSV. Each Concept has: Concept, Definition, Synonyms, Related concepts. Stated problem: "AI tools are great at producing output that sounds right. But without product context, they often get the details wrong—especially when your product uses terms that overlap with everyday language." Served to agents via atono_get_glossary. Limits: §10.

Naming caution: "Product Knowledge" names the Glossary and AI Context together. Describing the Glossary alone as Product Knowledge is the most common modeling error about this product.

4.5 Ask Capy

AI assistant answering questions from completed stories/bugs on public teams, with linked sources. Capy is the capybara mascot. Gates and quotas: §5 and §10.

4.6 The two intake lanes

Unassigned work doesn't sit in a generic backlog — it goes to a purpose-built lane. Both have fixed, non-customizable step sequences (see the scope boundary in §3):

• Story refinement — Idea → Refinement → Ready for assignment → Won't do. Workspace-wide and open to everyone.
• Bug triage — bugs wait here until they have both a team and a risk rating; then they drop to the bottom of that team's "To do." Bugs sitting past the triage warning threshold (§10) get flagged.

4.7 The Story assistant (July 2026 — the flagship AI authoring feature)

A conversational assistant, opened from any story, that turns a discussion of what you want to build into a well-formed user story + acceptance criteria. It is the clearest proof of the "context has to travel with the work" thesis, because of what it reads and what it writes back:

Context it reads: the story's current title/content, its epic and peer stories, the product glossary, and the design decisions already in the story's AI context. If no glossary exists, it says so and links you to build one — explicitly making the glossary the quality lever ("grounded in your product rather than generic assumptions").

How it works: free-text or a "Guide me through it" structured Q&A (quick-pick cards, one or multiple answers, skippable). It generates one or more user stories (reusing existing personas, creating one only when none fits), then acceptance criteria (which it may add, rewrite, reorder, split, or remove).

Staged, not applied: all output sits in a preview with AI content highlighted. You accept the whole set, reject it, edit staged text directly, or undo/redo the most recent AI change. The conversation is saved as you go; long conversations get summarized to preserve context.

The load-bearing loop-closer: design decisions surfaced in the conversation are written into the story's AI context (DESIGN) — and therefore become available to other AI tools via the MCP server, so the same rationale informs coding, testing, and later implementation. This is the human-authoring surface and the agent-memory surface being the same object.

Provenance: changes stay attributed to the person driving; a sparkle ✦ marks AI involvement with tooltip "Performed by Story assistant," and Activities can be filtered by Source: Story assistant — a new activity source alongside Atono / Integration / API / MCP.

Doc: /docs/story-assistant.

4.8 Tags (July 2026 — cross-type organizing primitive)

Key:value labels (Component: api, Severity: high) — the only grouping concept that spans stories, bugs, AND epics (product themes are stories-only; timeboxes hold stories+bugs but not epics). Rules that matter:

• A tag applied to an item is a single key:value pair; an item may hold one value per key. Size limits: §10.
• Keys and values are case-insensitive (retain original casing).
• Anyone can apply/create/remove tags on an item. Workspace Owners & Administrators manage them centrally on the Tags page (define keys, add descriptions, standardize, see usage counts, rename — which propagates everywhere — and delete, with an affected-item count shown first).
• Filterable in Everything (by key, by value, or absence of a key), searchable (tag values are indexed by Search), bulk-applied from Everything, and available as an Everything column.
• Tag add/remove is logged in the item's Activities (filter Type: Tag). Doc: /docs/tags.

Positioned as a foundation — "more ways to manage, apply, and explore tags coming soon."

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5. AI features and their gates

Most AI features are gated on having enough data to be trustworthy. Agents should know these, because "the feature isn't working" is usually "the threshold isn't met." Some features have no gate at all; the distinction matters and is made explicit below.

Hard gates — the feature is unavailable until the condition is met

Soft gates — the feature runs, but quality degrades

No gate

Glossary build limits (crawl duration, TSV size) are capacity constraints, not gates: §10.

Recurring thresholds across the product: 100 characters of content, 25 workspace items, 5 historical reference items.

Attribution: AI-generated values display a sparkle (✦). Agent actions are attributed by source — MCP-performed actions show "Performed by MCP server"; Story-assistant changes show "Performed by Story assistant" — both filterable in Activities. Either way the human driver stays the attributed author. This is the audit trail for agent actions.

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6. The MCP server — how agents actually use Atono

A locally-running Docker container bridging MCP-enabled tools (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code/Copilot, Windsurf, Codex) to an Atono workspace.

Command: docker
Args: ["run", "--pull=always", "-i", "--rm", "-e", "X_API_KEY", "atonoai/atono-mcp-server:latest"]
Env:  X_API_KEY=YOUR_ATONO_API_KEY

Prereqs: Docker Desktop v27.0+, an Atono API key, an MCP-enabled tool. Auto-updates on restart.

The 41 tools

Corrected from 38. The previous count was stale; the tool list below sums to 41, and matches the live https://docs.atono.io/docs/atono-mcp-tools page. Recount on each release that adds MCP tools, and keep this number in sync with Strategy & Moat and /solutions/build, which both carried the old figure.

• Setup & context (5) — atono_configuration, atono_list_users, atono_list_teams, atono_get_team_workflow, atono_get_glossary
• Stories (10) — atono_get_story, atono_list_story_personas, atono_create_story, atono_update_story_title, atono_update_story_content, atono_update_story_ac, atono_update_story_additional_content, atono_update_story_team, atono_update_story_step, atono_update_story_assignee
• Bugs (7) — atono_list_environments, atono_get_bug, atono_create_bug, atono_update_bug, atono_update_bug_step, atono_update_bug_assignee, atono_document_bug_fix
• Epics (7) — atono_create_epic, atono_get_epic, atono_update_epic_title, atono_update_epic_description, atono_update_epic_user_stories, atono_add_story_to_epic, atono_remove_story_from_epic
• Subtasks (4) — atono_get_subtasks, atono_create_subtask, atono_update_subtask, atono_delete_subtask
• Attachments (3) — atono_upload_file_url, atono_create_attachment, atono_get_attachment
• Timeboxes (2) — atono_list_timeboxes, atono_list_timebox_items
• Linked items (1) — atono_link_bugs_or_stories
• AI context (2) — atono_get_ai_context, atono_update_ai_context

Rule: always call atono_get_ai_context before atono_update_ai_context.

Agent cautions

• Some operations are not reversible. atono_update_story_ac and atono_update_epic_user_stories replace all criteria/statements rather than appending. Same for atono_update_epic_description and atono_update_story_additional_content.
• Treat API keys as passwords; never commit them.
• The server exposes only defined Atono actions and cannot reach data outside the workspace.

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7. Metrics — exact definitions

Agents get these wrong by assuming industry-standard definitions. Atono's are specific.

Cycle time — total cumulative time an item spends in "In progress"-category steps. Starts on To do → In progress; stops at Done. Pauses when the item leaves the category, resumes on re-entry. Resets to zero when an item moves to a different team (and reappears if moved back). Includes nights and weekends by design — it forecasts calendar delivery, not working hours. Unavailable for: never-started items, "Won't do" items, and outliers.

Outliers — items with abnormally long cycle time, manually excluded from averages by Workspace Owners/Admins, Backlog Owners, or Team Admins. Excluded from estimated completion dates too.

Staleness indicator (hourglass icon) — flags an item as stalled when all hold:

• Time in an "In progress" step exceeds 3× the standard deviation of similar items
• ≥5 historical reference items of the same type and size exist
• The item isn't an outlier
• Reference window: past 180 days, team-specific
• Comparison grouped by item type and size ("Unsized" is its own category)

Snooze (team admins / workspace admins only): 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or Until changed. Hides it for all users; resets when the item changes step or team.

Story points (Fibonacci) — XXS=1, XS=2, S=3, M=5, L=8, XL=13, XXL=21. Unsized stories are imputed as the team's average completed size, rounded to the nearest Fibonacci number.

Estimated completion dates (Kanban) — four steps: (1) average cycle time over the averaging window (default 6 months, configurable 1–12 or from a date); (2) derive daily throughput; (3) separate averages per item type and per size — falling back to a general story average when a size has <5 items; (4) for each To do item, sum the estimated cycle times of all preceding items ÷ throughput, then add its own cycle time. Recomputes live on reorder. Shows orange when projected past a timebox end date.

Burndown projection (Scrum) — regression trend line. Requires 3 full days of data, the sprint ≥50% elapsed, and 2 prior completed sprints. Statuses: On track / Ahead / Behind. Three lines: Guideline (ideal linear), Actual, Projected. Grouped by team time zone (default US/Pacific), not the viewer's.

Sprint capacity projection — average velocity of completed sprints → daily rate × calendar days including weekends. Needs ≥2 completed sprints. Overage renders as an "overfill segment."

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8. Roles and permissions

Roles are additive — a user may hold several and permissions combine. Workspace roles set the baseline; team roles add within a team; flag and glossary permissions operate independently.

Workspace roles

• Workspace Owner — everything, including plan/billing and workspace deletion. Cannot remove the role from themselves.
• Administrator — identical to Owner except billing/plan. Manages settings, environments, integrations, users; can edit/delete others' comments.
• Product Manager — manages product themes; adds/removes backlog owners; accesses all public and private backlogs; manages glossary.
• Standard User — the default baseline everything stacks on. Can create teams, manage bugs, comment, create and apply feature flags, mark outliers, triage bugs, view/export glossary.

Team roles

• Team Admin — team details, delete team, change access type and methodology, manage admins and backlog owners, customize workflow. Cannot self-remove.
• Backlog Owner — manages upcoming stories and (Scrum) sprint planning. Need not be a team member. Cap in §10.
• Team Member — edit team details, manage Slack channel, access private team backlog.

Two conditional-permission traps

These are non-obvious and reverse behavior based on whether anyone holds the role:

• Product themes — if no Product Manager exists, anyone can manage themes. If ≥1 exists, only they can.
• Backlog management — if no backlog owner is assigned, anyone with access manages stories. If ≥1 is assigned, others cannot create/delete stories or manage sprints. (Bugs stay open to team members regardless.)

Independent permission tiers

• Feature flags: User (toggle, configure, define slices) → Owner (+ rename, remove from story, delete). Can't remove the last Owner or last User. Team permissions, once auto-granted, are never automatically revoked.
• Glossary: Contributor (add/edit/delete/restore concepts) → Owner (+ manage permissions, refresh, delete glossary). Workspace Owners/Admins/PMs get Owner-level automatically; everyone else is read-only.

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9. Feature flags — the full model

Naming: must start with a lowercase letter or underscore; only lowercase letters, underscores, numbers. Length in §10.

Five statuses, all framed around deletion safety:

Slices — conditional subsets that override the default value. Two attribute types (Customer, Location); ≤2 conditions per slice (one of each), combined with AND. Evaluated top-to-bottom, first match wins — so slice order is load-bearing. Customer values are case-sensitive, ≤255 chars. Location derives from request IP (continent → state/province, ISO codes searchable).

SDK: @atono-io/web-sdk, @atono-io/react-sdk.

import { Atono } from '@atono-io/web-sdk';
const atono = Atono.fromEnvironmentKey('$ENV_KEY');
const featureFlags = await atono.getFeatureFlags();
if (featureFlags.getBooleanValue('flag_name', false)) { /* ... */ }

React: wrap in <AtonoProvider environmentKey="…">, read via useFeatureFlag(). Server-side: pass context per request with makeEvaluationContext().

Runtime: config snapshot loads at startup into memory; polls every 5 seconds; evaluation events queue for reporting (this feeds "last evaluated" and the inactivity rule); falls back to the default argument when Atono is unreachable or the flag is missing.

Two documented traps:

• Bulk-configuring flags from the list page deletes their slices.
• Renaming a flag or environment breaks code references — the failure mode is silent fallback to SDK defaults plus logged errors.

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10. Hard limits and constants (quick reference)

The single home for every numeric limit in this document. Values marked (Free) are plan-dependent — see §11.

ID scheme: sequential per type (STORY-123, BUG-456), never reused unless the highest number is deleted. Bare IDs auto-render as clickable pills in bodies, comments, and activities.

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11. Plan availability

Not in docs.atono.io — sourced from https://atono.io/pricing (July 2026). Included because an agent reasoning about Atono will be asked "can I do this on the free plan," and the docs alone cannot answer it. Verify against the live pricing page before quoting to a customer.

Three plans: Free (up to 25 users, $0, no expiration) · Starter ($19/user/month) · Growth ($39/user/month).

The non-obvious one: the MCP server is available on every plan, but AI Context — the thing the MCP server is most useful for reading — is a 30-day trial on Free. An agent connected to a Free workspace past its trial will find the MCP tools present and the context they fetch empty. That is a licensing state, not a bug.

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12. Integrations

Slack — connects channels to teams and to individual stories. Posts: team/channel membership changes, story-channel links, flag added/removed from story, flag environment toggles, slice updates, flag renames. Admin enables workspace-wide; users then link personal accounts. Flag notifications default ON for all environments.

GitHub — auto-links PRs to items by detecting IDs in PR title, description, and branch name (required); optionally comments and commit messages (admin-configured). Shows the 6 most recent PRs with status and build status. Updates may take up to 12 hours. Re-enabling requires new PR activity to re-detect. Read-only: it surfaces PR state on the item and does not act on the repository.

Chrome extension — three jobs: (1) report bugs with auto-collected URL, OS, browser, viewport, console errors, network errors; (2) flip feature flags for the current environment and customer, auto-targeting or creating the relevant slice; (3) map clicks to stories for usage tracking without code changes (prefer the id attribute). Setup requires two meta tags: atono:environment (env key) and atono:tenancy (tenant ID, multi-tenant apps only).

API — https://api.atono.io/api/v1/, header X-API-KEY. JSON:API conventions. Keys are per-user; actions attribute to that user. Limits in §10.

Imports — Jira (via Cloud API) and Linear (via CSV export).

• Jira: Priority → Risk rating (Highest=25, High=16, none=9, Low=4, Lowest=1); Story points → shirt size; issue key → External ID. Three scope options (issues only / +involved users / complete).
• Linear: Projects → Product themes (by name); Labels → item type (Story/Improvement→Story, Bug→Bug); archived issues not imported; estimates import as numbers but aren't mapped to sizes. Teams import as public by default — pre-create matching private teams to preserve privacy.
• Both: imported teams default to Kanban; stories land in Story refinement, bugs in Bug triage; External ID enables cross-referencing and duplicate skipping.

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13. Gotchas an agent will otherwise get wrong

Atono does not check whether an AI-generated change preserves product intent. Checking a change against the record, flagging violations, and auto-clearing safe ones are a stated forward direction, not shipped behavior. What ships is context supply plus an attribution trail. Never describe Atono as validating, gating, or approving agent changes — and note the GitHub integration is read-only PR linking (§12), so it does not gate merges.

Search excludes completed work. Search covers Story refinement, Bug triage, and team backlogs — but not items in "Done" or "Won't do." To query shipped work, use Ask Capy, which searches only completed items. The two are complements, not overlapping.

Cycle time resets on team change — and reappears if the item returns to the original team.

Switching methodology destroys data. Scrum → Kanban deletes sprints. Kanban → Scrum moves in-progress items to "To do" and marks them Unscheduled.

Releases are date markers, not containers. Stories are never "added to" a release the way they're added to a theme or timebox — they relate to it by projected completion date. There is no documented flag↔release link.

You can't reorder items while filters are applied. Clear filters first.

Splitting a story: moving a parent AC with all its children preserves original IDs; moving only some children copies the parent with a new ID. Both halves stay in the epic.

Copy behavior depends on category. Copying from To do/In progress carries workflow step, assignee, backlog, timebox. From Done/Won't do those fields clear.

Moving a story to another team clears its size estimate (so the new team re-estimates).

Version restore can lose data — AC-level comments and attachments may be dropped; general comments and below-text attachments survive. The system warns first.

Kanban "In progress" shows only the 20 most recent To do items; the rest live in Backlog.

Timebox reassignment is a move, not a copy — adding an item to a new timebox removes it from the old one.

Private team content is redacted, not hidden — titles obscure in linked items, themes, timeboxes, and flag lists ([Private team story]).

Bulk flag configuration deletes slices. See §9.

Ask Capy's quota is per-workspace, not per-user. See §10.

Story assistant changes are staged, not saved. They live in a preview; navigating away from the story before accepting loses them (Atono warns first). Closing just the assistant panel keeps the preview. Undo only reaches the most recent AI change, and only until the next change or a manual edit.

Ask Capy vs. Story assistant are different tools. Capy answers questions from completed, public work (read-only, whole-workspace). The Story assistant authors one story from its own context (read/write, single-story). Don't conflate "the AI feature."

Tags: one value per key per item. You can't put Component: api and Component: web on the same item — applying a second value for an existing key replaces the first (bulk apply warns before overwriting).

Product Knowledge is two things, not one. Glossary (workspace) plus AI Context (per item). See §2.

The intake lanes don't follow the workflow-category rules. See §3.

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14. Vocabulary quick reference

Terms whose Atono meaning differs from the industry default, or that don't exist elsewhere:

• Product context — the category noun: the preserved record of product intent. The external term.
• Product Knowledge — the Atono feature name for where product context lives: Glossary + AI Context. Not a synonym for product context, and not the Glossary alone.
• Backlog item — umbrella for story or bug (not epics, not subtasks)
• Handle — the nickname form of an item ID (STORY-123)
• AI context — durable agent memory on an item (DESIGN / INVESTIGATION / SUMMARY)
• Concept — a single glossary entry
• Capy — the capybara mascot; Ask Capy is the AI assistant (Q&A over completed public work)
• Story assistant — conversational AI that authors a single story from its own context (glossary + epic + AI context); stages changes for review; writes design decisions to AI context
• Tag — a key:value label on stories, bugs, or epics; the only cross-type grouping
• Persona — a reusable user type in "As a [persona]…"; the Story assistant reuses these
• Design decision — a rationale/scope/tradeoff entry the Story assistant writes to AI context (DESIGN)
• Timebox — a time-bound grouping of items on a timeline; MCP docs call it "equivalent to sprints in Scrum contexts," but in-product a timebox and a sprint are distinct objects
• Product theme — strategic grouping (Linear "project" maps here)
• Slice — a conditional subset of users/environments overriding a flag's default
• Risk rating — Probability × Impact, 1–25 (bugs only)
• Outlier — an item manually excluded from cycle time math
• Staleness indicator — hourglass marking a statistically stalled item
• Story refinement / Bug triage — the two pre-team intake lanes
• Everything — the workspace-wide item view
• View — a saved filter/sort/column configuration; shareable; can back a Home widget
• Environment key — joins your code to a workspace+environment
• External ID — the original Jira/Linear ID, retained after import
• Stakeholder — a user in a critical team role (Team admin or Backlog owner)
• Mapped action — a click recorded by the Chrome extension and tied to a story
• Sparkle (✦) — marks an AI-generated value or agent action (MCP server or Story assistant; hover/filter by Source to tell which)

Jira Product Map

Jira — Product Map (July 28, 2026)

A semantic model of Atlassian Jira (Jira Cloud) for AI agents. Built from a structured crawl of Atlassian's official support and developer documentation (support.atlassian.com, developer.atlassian.com, admin.atlassian.com) plus the official atlassian/atlassian-mcp-server repo, current to mid-2026. This is not a link index — it explains what Jira is, how its concepts relate, and the rules that govern them, so an agent can reason about Jira without re-reading the docs.

Scope note: this describes Jira Cloud (the SaaS product). Jira Data Center/Server behaves differently in several places (notably attachment limits and admin model) and is called out where it matters. "Jira Software," "Jira Work Management," and "Jira Service Management" are converging into one Jira; this map covers the software/agile core.

Terminology currency: Atlassian is mid-rollout of an "issue" → "work item" rename (UI-level, main push March 2025). This map treats work item = issue as exact synonyms and uses "issue" for anything API/JQL-facing, because the APIs and query language were not renamed.

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1. What Jira is, in one paragraph

Jira is a highly configurable work-tracking platform built around a single primitive — the issue (now also called a "work item") — that moves through a customizable workflow of statuses, lives in exactly one project, and is grouped, filtered, and reported on through an extensive scheme system. Its defining trait is configurability: nearly everything (issue types, fields, screens, workflows, permissions, notifications) is expressed as a reusable scheme that admins compose and share across projects. Agile delivery (Scrum/Kanban boards, sprints, backlogs, velocity) sits on top of this generic issue engine as a board layer — a board is a saved filter with columns, not a container. The result is a system that can model almost any process, at the cost of significant administrative surface area. Jira's own current direction is AI: the Rovo layer (search, chat, agents) and an official remote MCP server now expose that issue graph to agents.

Why this framing matters

Jira is the configuration-maximalist end of the work-tracking spectrum. The mental model that trips up both humans and agents is that Jira separates what an issue is (project + issue type + fields) from where it's shown (boards, filters, dashboards) from how it's governed (schemes and permissions). Those three planes are independent, and most "why can't I see / do / report on X" confusion comes from a mismatch between them — a status that isn't column-mapped, a field hidden by a field configuration, a permission scheme that doesn't grant browse, a board filter that excludes the issue. An agent that holds all three planes in mind at once will predict Jira's behavior; one that thinks only in "issues and statuses" will not.

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2. The mental model — how the pieces relate

SITE  ({your-domain}.atlassian.net — an Atlassian org may hold several products)
│
├── PROJECT  (hard container; an issue lives in exactly 1; key prefix = PROJ)
│   │   Two project TYPES, a fork that changes almost everything:
│   │   ├── Team-managed  (was "next-gen") — self-contained, project admin configures, NO schemes
│   │   └── Company-managed (was "classic") — Jira admin configures via SHARED SCHEMES
│   │
│   ├── ISSUE / WORK ITEM ◄──────────── the primitive
│   │   ├── Issue type (Story / Task / Bug / Epic / Subtask / custom)
│   │   ├── Status ──── belongs to exactly one of 3 STATUS CATEGORIES (To Do/In Progress/Done)
│   │   ├── Resolution ──── separate field; "resolved" == this field is SET, not the status (see §12)
│   │   ├── Fields (system + custom; visibility governed by Field Configuration)
│   │   ├── Parent ──── unified hierarchy link (replaced legacy "Epic Link")
│   │   ├── Estimate ──── Story points (free numeric) / time / issue count
│   │   ├── Fix Version(s) / Affects Version(s) ──── release markers (project-scoped)
│   │   ├── Component(s) ──── project sub-category, optional default assignee
│   │   ├── Label(s) ──── the ONLY global, uncontrolled, cross-project tag
│   │   ├── Sprint ──── system field; can hold a HISTORY of sprints
│   │   ├── Rank (LexoRank) ──── global execution ordering, distinct from Priority
│   │   ├── Flagged ──── system flag; only value is "Impediment" (visual blocked marker)
│   │   ├── Development panel ──── linked branches/commits/PRs/builds/deploys + external FLAGS
│   │   ├── Comments, Attachments, Links (blocks/relates/duplicates — lateral, not hierarchy)
│   │   └── History / activity
│   │
│   ├── HIERARCHY (default levels)
│   │   Level 2+  Initiative / Feature / custom  ── Premium only, via PLANS
│   │   Level 1   Epic                            ── top of the STANDARD hierarchy (fixed position)
│   │   Level 0   Story · Task · Bug              ── the base "standard" work items (same level)
│   │   Level −1  Subtask                         ── child of a level-0 item only
│   │
│   ├── CONFIGURATION SCHEMES (company-managed only — the shared, admin-owned layer)
│   │   Workflow scheme · Issue type scheme · Screen scheme · Issue-type screen scheme
│   │   Field configuration scheme · Permission scheme · Notification scheme · Security scheme
│   │
│   └── VERSIONS · COMPONENTS  (project-scoped; do not span projects)
│
├── BOARD  (a filtered, columnized VIEW over a JQL filter — NOT a container)
│   ├── Scrum board ── Backlog + Sprints (time-boxed)
│   └── Kanban board ── continuous flow, WIP limits, optional Kanban backlog
│       └── Columns map to statuses · rightmost column defines "done" for sprint completion
│
├── PLANS  (Premium/Enterprise — "Advanced Roadmaps") ── cross-project program planning,
│          initiatives/custom levels, dependencies, capacity, scenario sandbox
│
├── JQL  (Jira Query Language) ── the query layer under filters, boards, dashboards, automation
│
├── AUTOMATION  (Trigger → Conditions → Actions; monthly execution caps by plan)
│
├── ROVO  (AI layer) ── Rovo Search · Rovo Chat · Rovo Agents · Rovo Dev
│
└── PERMISSIONS
   ├── Global permissions (site-wide, group-assigned)
   ├── Project permissions ── via permission SCHEME (company-managed) or in-project roles (team-managed)
   └── Org/Site admin (admin.atlassian.com)

The single most important structural fact: a board is not a container — it is a saved filter with columns. An issue lives in a project; it appears on a board only if it matches the board's JQL filter, its status is mapped to a column, and (for Scrum) its Sprint field is set. Break any of those three and the issue vanishes from the board while still existing in the project. Nearly every Jira surprise is a version of this.

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3. The three status categories (universal spine)

Every status a team defines rolls up to exactly one of three fixed status categories. The categories and their colors are hard-coded; the statuses within them are fully customizable.

Rules an agent should know:

• Categories are fixed (three, non-customizable, fixed colors). Status names are free; many statuses can share one category.
• Two different "done" definitions coexist and can disagree — this is the single most important Jira subtlety:
  • Agile reports (velocity, burndown, sprint completion, CFD) treat an item as done when its status is in the rightmost board column.
  • Issue-navigator / Created-vs-Resolved treat an item as resolved when the Resolution field is set (see §12).
  • A status change alone does neither reliably unless configured to.
• A workflow may have conditions (who may transition), validators (input must be valid or the transition is blocked), and post-functions (run automatically after a successful transition — e.g. set Resolution).
• Company-managed workflows are governed by workflow schemes (shared, admin-owned, mapped per issue type). Team-managed projects edit their workflow directly in-project, with no scheme.

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4. The distinctive concepts (what makes Jira not Linear)

If an agent internalizes one section, it should be this one. These are the parts a generic work-tracker model gets wrong.

4.1 Team-managed vs company-managed is a fork, not a setting

The single biggest branch in Jira's model. The same conceptual action has a different path, owner, and permission depending on project type:

There is no in-place conversion: you create a new project of the target type and bulk-move issues, remapping config. An agent must know which type a project is before reasoning about how to change its workflow or who can.

4.2 Schemes — configuration as shared, reusable objects

In company-managed projects, almost every aspect of an issue's behavior is a scheme (workflow, issue type, screen, field configuration, permission, notification, security). A scheme is defined once and attached to many projects, so an admin change propagates org-wide. This is the source of both Jira's power (org-wide standardization) and its opacity (a field's behavior is set three layers away, in a field-configuration scheme, not on the issue). Team-managed projects deliberately have no schemes.

4.3 Resolution is a separate field from status

Jira splits where an issue is (Status) from why it closed (Resolution). An issue is "resolved" only when the Resolution field has a value — a Done-status issue with an empty Resolution shows as Unresolved and is excluded from resolved-work reports. Correct setups set Resolution via a transition post-function and clear it on reopen. This is Jira's #1 misconfiguration and #1 agent gotcha (see §12).

4.4 Boards are views, not containers

A Scrum or Kanban board is a JQL filter + column mapping. Columns map to statuses; the rightmost column defines sprint-completion "done." An issue's presence on a board is derived, not stored. Boards can span projects (company-managed only). This inverts the intuition that "the board" owns the work — the project does.

4.5 The issue hierarchy is fixed at the standard levels

Epic (level 1) sits atop Story/Task/Bug (level 0), which sit atop Subtask (level −1). This shape is fixed — you can rename Epic but not reposition it, and subtasks attach only to level-0 items (recent change: subtasks can no longer be created directly under an Epic). Levels above Epic (Initiative, Feature, custom) exist only in Plans on Premium/Enterprise. The modern unified parent link is the Parent field; the legacy "Epic Link" custom field has been merged into it.

4.6 Feature flags are a visibility surface, not a native capability

Jira has no native feature-flag engine. The Development/Releases panel displays flags from external tools (LaunchDarkly, Split) — name, environment, on/off, rollout %. Flags link to issues by referencing the issue key. Jira never evaluates or toggles a flag; that logic lives entirely in the external tool. Jira is a read/visibility surface only.

4.7 Automation is native but metered

"Automation for Jira" is a no-code rule engine (Trigger → Conditions → Actions) with smart-value templating. It's genuinely powerful (scheduled rules, webhooks, dev-event triggers, for-each branches) but execution is capped monthly by plan (see §5/§10), and since Nov 2023 single-project and multi-project runs both count. Hit the cap and all rules for that product stop until the month resets.

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5. AI features (Rovo) and their gating

Atlassian consolidated its AI under the Rovo brand (formerly "Atlassian Intelligence"). Three pillars: Rovo Search, Rovo Chat, Rovo Agents, plus Rovo Dev (developer agent + CLI) and Rovo Studio (no-code agent builder).

Gating rules an agent should know:

• Rovo is auto-enabled on Standard, Premium, and Enterprise — not Free. Not available in Government Cloud or Confluence sandboxes. Admin-toggleable via Atlassian Administration → Rovo.
• Metered by Rovo credits per user/month: 25 (Standard) / 70 (Premium) / 150 (Enterprise); "Teamwork Collection" allowances are far larger. As of mid-2026 Atlassian was not billing overage and commits to 90 days' notice before charging.

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6. The MCP server & API — how agents actually use Jira

Atlassian Remote MCP Server (official)

A cloud-hosted, remote MCP server (github.com/atlassian/atlassian-mcp-server) — beta May 2025 (Claude was the first official partner), GA February 2026. Marketed as Rovo MCP.

• Covers: Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, Bitbucket Cloud, Compass.
• Endpoint: https://mcp.atlassian.com/v1/mcp/authv2.
• ~72+ tools, grouped by permission scope: read, write, search (Jira & Confluence), plus cross-product read_teamwork_graph and search_atlassian. Jira tools: search issues, create/update tickets, bulk operations.
• Auth: OAuth 2.1 (browser, for Jira/Confluence/Compass) or API tokens (headless; mandatory for JSM and Bitbucket). It is a proxy that respects the signed-in user's existing permissions and does not store or cache data.
• Constraints: TLS 1.2+, honors org IP allowlists. No published rate limits; docs recommend maxResults: 10 on searches to control token usage.

REST API

• Base: https://{domain}.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/{resource} (direct) or https://api.atlassian.com/ex/jira/{cloudId}/rest/api/3/{resource} (OAuth 3LO). v3 is current (rich text as Atlassian Document Format / ADF).
• Auth: API token (Basic = email + token), OAuth 2.0 (3LO), or Forge/Connect app auth. Keys act as the user; actions attribute to that user.
• Cost-based ("points") rate limiting (governs OAuth 3LO + Forge from March 2, 2026; API-token traffic stays on older burst limits): each request costs points by work done (base 1/request; reads add per-object cost; writes = 1). Default shared global pool ~65,000 points/hour; opt-in per-tenant pools scale with plan and users, capped at 500,000 points/hour. Three concurrent limits: hourly points, per-second burst, and per-issue write limits (20 ops/2s, 100 ops/30s). Breach → 429, respect Retry-After, back off with jitter.
• Pagination: JQL search moved to token-based pagination — POST /rest/api/3/search/jql returns a nextPageToken; offset pagination (startAt/total) is deprecated for search.
• Extensibility: Forge (serverless, Atlassian-hosted) and Connect (older iframe/webhook) apps extend Jira on the same rate regime.

JQL — the query layer

Field → operator → value(s)/function. Operators include =, ~ (contains), IN, IS EMPTY, and the history operators WAS / CHANGED (query past states). Functions: currentUser(), membersOf(), openSprints(), linkedIssues(), startOfDay(). ORDER BY must be last. Critically: raw JQL searches ALL issues regardless of status — including Done/Closed/resolved — unless you filter them out. (Board views may hide old done items; JQL does not.)

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7. Metrics — exact definitions

Agents get these wrong by assuming industry-standard definitions. Jira's are specific, and several depend on configuration rather than being fixed.

• Velocity — average of total completed estimates over recent sprints; two bars per sprint (Commitment vs Completed). "Completed" = status in the rightmost board column (not the Resolution field). Subtask estimates are excluded — only parent-level estimates count.
• Sprint burndown — remaining work vs time within one sprint; grey Guideline = ideal line. Adding items/subtasks mid-sprint is scope change. Board-specific (only the board's filtered, column-mapped items).
• Burnup — completed vs total scope as two lines, so scope changes are legible (unlike burndown).
• Sprint report — buckets a completed sprint's issues into Completed / Incomplete (carryover) / Removed, with a timestamped scope-change event log — the only native place to trace when scope changed.
• Control chart (cycle time / lead time) — cycle time = time spent working on an item (from work begins to work complete); lead time = from when the item was logged (created) to complete, including queue time. Which statuses count is user-configured, not fixed — practically cycle = In Progress-category → Done-category; lead = creation → Done. Uses a rolling average (window = 20% of shown items, odd, min 5) with a std-dev band.
• Cumulative flow diagram (CFD) — stacked area of item counts per status/column over time; a widening band = a bottleneck in that column.
• Created vs Resolved — created vs resolved over time; red = backlog growing, green = shrinking. "Resolved" here keys off the Resolution field (see §12).
• Epic report / burndown — progress toward an epic; forecasts sprints needed from historical velocity.
• Version report / Release burndown — projected release date for a version, flagging if it will slip.

Two aging notes: Jira has no native "time in status" report (Marketplace-app territory); the board's Days in Column dots are the closest native aging signal. Flagging an issue sets the system Flagged = Impediment field, turns the card yellow, and is a visual blocked marker — it does not change status (flagged is not EMPTY in JQL).

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8. Roles and permissions

Jira permissions operate on multiple independent planes; the plane depends on project type.

Site/Org level (admin.atlassian.com):

• Org admin / Site admin — manage the Atlassian org, product access grants, and product-admin rights.
• Global permissions — site-wide capabilities (Administer Jira, Browse users, Bulk change, Create shared objects); assigned to groups; editable only by admins.

Company-managed project permissions (scheme-driven):

• Permission scheme — a reusable map of permissions (Browse Projects, Create/Assign/Transition Issues, Administer Projects…) to holders = users, groups, or project roles. Shared across projects; changes require a Jira admin.
• Project roles — like groups but scoped to one project (Administrator, Member, custom). Role definitions are global; membership is per-project and editable by project admins (unlike group membership, which needs a site admin). Best practice: schemes hold roles; groups carry identity.

Team-managed project permissions:

• Project admins manage access directly via custom roles created in-project — flexible and autonomous, but no shared schemes (risk of "role sprawl").

The recurring surprise: because company-managed permissions live in a shared scheme three layers from the issue, "why can't user X do Y" is usually a permission-scheme holder mismatch, not an issue-level setting.

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9. Feature flags — the external integration model

Jira does not manage flags; it surfaces them. Detail worth holding:

• The Development/Releases panel on an issue shows linked flags from LaunchDarkly / Split: flag name, environment, enabled/disabled, rollout %. Selecting one opens a dev dialog.
• Flags link to issues by referencing the issue key (e.g. LaunchDarkly auto-adds a Jira link when connected). "+ Add feature flag" can create/link from the panel.
• Automation smart values include a development/feature-flag category, but Jira never evaluates or toggles a flag — the engine is entirely external. Treat Jira as read-only visibility over someone else's flag system.

(Contrast for positioning: this is the inverse of platforms where the flag lives inside the work item and is toggled from it — in Jira the flag lives in a separate product and Jira merely mirrors its state.)

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10. Hard limits and constants (quick reference)

Many current caps come from Atlassian's data limits & guardrails page with phased enforcement (dates noted). Some are recommendations, not hard walls.

Not published as fixed caps: max subtasks per issue, max comments per issue, boards per project, sprints per board (governed by the guardrails, not per-issue numbers).

Issue key scheme: PROJ-123 (project key = 2+ uppercase letters + per-project sequential counter). Keys are never reused. Moving an issue between projects gives it a new key; the old key becomes a redirecting alias. Moving back assigns yet another new number (the original is not reclaimed). Text matching the key pattern auto-hyperlinks in descriptions, comments, and commit messages.

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11. Integrations

• Confluence — the native knowledge base. Issues surface related Confluence content (permission-respecting); pages embed Jira issues/JQL/roadmaps. Rovo searches across both.
• Bitbucket / GitHub / GitLab — the Development panel shows linked branches, commits, PRs, builds, deployments. Smart commits and PR/branch linking work by putting the issue key in branch names, commit messages, and PR titles; smart-commit syntax can comment, log time, and transition issues from a commit.
• Slack / Teams — two-way notifications and issue creation from chat (Rovo can generate issues from context).
• Marketplace — thousands of Connect/Forge apps (Tempo, ScriptRunner, Xray, structure tools) extend Jira; many "native-feeling" capabilities (time-in-status, test management) are actually apps.
• Imports — CSV, plus migration tooling from other trackers. External IDs are commonly retained for cross-reference.

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12. Gotchas an agent will otherwise get wrong

• Resolution vs Status is the #1 trap. An issue in a Done status with an empty Resolution is "Unresolved" and missing from resolved-work reports. Set Resolution via a transition post-function; clear it on reopen (reopening does not auto-clear it). Never expose Resolution on the create/edit screen — drive it only through transitions.
• Two "done" definitions disagree. Agile reports key off the rightmost board column; Created-vs-Resolved and "Unresolved" key off the Resolution field. The same issue can be "done" to one and not the other.
• A board is a filter, not a container. An issue can match the board's JQL yet be missing because its status isn't column-mapped or its Sprint field is unset/hidden. Sprints only appear on a board if the board filter matches ≥1 issue in the sprint.
• Team-managed and company-managed can't share hierarchy or schemes. An item in one type can't be parented to the other; migrating between types is a move-and-remap, not a toggle, and loses/remaps config.
• Moving issues remaps or strips fields. Fields absent in the target project lose their values; subtasks must move with their parent; issue types may need remapping. The key changes (§10).
• Sprint completion uses the rightmost column, not the Done category or Resolution. Subtasks not in the rightmost column make the parent incomplete.
• The story-points field is not one field. Company-managed uses "Story Points"; team-managed uses "Story point estimate" — cross-project reports that expect one silently miss the other.
• Automation caps are shared and hard. Hit the monthly cap and every rule for that product stops until reset (since Nov 2023, multi-project/global runs count; single-project runs are exempt from the usage cap but still subject to service limits).
• JQL searches everything, including done/closed work — the opposite default of most board views. Filter status/resolution explicitly.
• Delete is permanent; archive (Premium/Enterprise) is reversible. Deleting a project deletes its issues.
• Field Configuration can silently break behavior. A hidden required field (e.g. Sprint) can make an issue un-savable or invisible to a board without any obvious error.
• Rank ≠ Priority. Rank (LexoRank) is execution order and is rewritten on every reorder (Jira rebalances ranks in the background); Priority is a business-value field. Reordering a backlog changes Rank, not Priority.
• "next-gen"/"classic" are the old names for team-managed/company-managed — older docs and UI use them interchangeably.
• Search runs on an index. Very recent edits or reindex windows can make JQL results briefly disagree with the actual data.

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13. Vocabulary quick reference

Terms whose Jira meaning differs from generic agile, or that are Jira-specific:

• Work item — the current name for Issue (UI rename, ~March 2025); identical object. APIs/JQL still say "issue."
• Resolution — a separate field recording why an issue closed; presence of a value = "resolved." Not a status.
• Status Category — the three fixed buckets (To Do / In Progress / Done) behind every status; drives reporting and coloring.
• Fix Version vs Affects Version — release the work ships in vs version a bug appears in.
• Component — a project sub-category; can carry a default assignee.
• Parent — the unified hierarchy link; Epic Link is the deprecated legacy field merged into it.
• Board vs Project — a Board is a filtered, columnized view (can span projects); a Project is the hard container.
• Filter — a saved JQL query underlying boards, dashboards, subscriptions.
• Quickfilter — a board toggle applying extra JQL atop the board filter.
• Swimlane — a horizontal board grouping (by assignee, epic, query…).
• Scheme (Workflow / Permission / Notification / Screen / Field Configuration / Issue Type) — a reusable config object shared across company-managed projects; the core of Jira's configurability.
• Screen — the set/arrangement of fields shown for create/edit/view or a specific transition.
• Field Configuration — governs field behavior (required, hidden, description).
• Story Points / Story point estimate — the numeric estimation field; named differently in company- vs team-managed projects.
• Sprint — a time-boxed iteration; a system field that can hold a history of sprints an issue was in.
• Backlog — ordered issues not in an active sprint (or the Kanban backlog view).
• Rank / LexoRank — the global execution-ordering string; rewritten on reorder; distinct from Priority.
• JQL — Jira Query Language; the query layer under everything.
• Team-managed (was "next-gen") vs Company-managed (was "classic") — the project-type fork (§4.1).
• Plans — cross-project/portfolio planning (Premium/Enterprise); lineage: Portfolio for Jira → Advanced Roadmaps → Plans.
• Rovo — Atlassian's AI layer: Rovo Search, Rovo Chat, Rovo Agents, Rovo Dev, Rovo Studio.
• Rovo credits — the per-user monthly consumption unit metering AI usage.
• Flagged / Impediment — the system flag marking an issue as blocked (visual only; the only value is "Impediment").
• Development panel — the issue panel showing linked dev activity and external feature flags.
• Forge / Connect — Atlassian's app-extensibility platforms (serverless / iframe-webhook).

Linear Product Map

Linear — Product Map (July 28, 2026)

A semantic model of Linear (linear.app) for AI agents. Built from a structured crawl of Linear's official documentation, developer docs, changelog, and "The Linear Method" (linear.app/docs, developers.linear.app, linear.app/changelog, linear.app/method), current to mid-2026. This is not a link index — it explains what Linear is, how its concepts relate, and the rules that govern them, so an agent can reason about Linear without re-reading the docs.

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1. What Linear is, in one paragraph

Linear is an opinionated, low-configuration work-tracking tool built for software product teams, organized around a fast, keyboard-first issue tracker with a deliberately small set of well-chosen primitives. Its unit is the issue, which belongs to exactly one team, moves through that team's workflow of statuses, and is planned along two parallel axes: a time axis (Cycles — Linear's word for sprints) and an outcome axis (Projects → Milestones, grouped upward into Initiatives). Where Jira maximizes configurability, Linear maximizes speed and defaults — it does fewer things and does them the same way for everyone, encoded as "The Linear Method." Two things define its current direction: it treats AI agents as first-class actors (agents can be assigned, @-mentioned, and delegated issues, with a full Agent Interaction SDK and session lifecycle), and it pushes AI into intake (Triage Intelligence auto-routes, labels, and de-duplicates incoming work).

Why this framing matters

Linear's design thesis is the inverse of Jira's: fewer knobs, stronger opinions. There is no per-issue-type custom workflow, no scheme system, no "sprint" as a separately named object. This makes Linear predictable — an agent can assume the defaults hold, because Linear intentionally does not let teams reshape the model as freely. The two mental-model forks an agent must hold are (1) Cycle vs Project — time-boxed team rhythm vs cross-team outcome — an issue can be in both; and (2) state type vs state name — teams invent status names, but behavior is driven by which of five fixed types the status maps to.

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2. The mental model — how the pieces relate

WORKSPACE  (linear.app/{name} — one company; holds all teams, projects, initiatives)
│
├── TEAM  (primary org unit; owns its OWN workflow, cycles, triage, labels)
│   │   Can nest: SUB-TEAMS up to 5 levels; sub-teams inherit workflow/cycles/labels
│   │
│   ├── ISSUE ◄──────────────── the unit of work (belongs to EXACTLY ONE team)
│   │   ├── Identifier  TEAM-123  (team key + per-team sequential number)
│   │   ├── Status ──── maps to one of 5 STATE TYPES (+ Triage, Duplicate) — see §3
│   │   ├── Priority ── fixed 5-value enum (No/Urgent/High/Medium/Low) — see §4.4
│   │   ├── Estimate ── Exponential / Fibonacci / Linear / T-shirt (team-chosen)
│   │   ├── Assignee (+ can be DELEGATED to an AI agent; human stays owner)
│   │   ├── Label(s) ── workspace- or team-level; label groups = single-select
│   │   ├── Project (≤1) · Project Milestone · Cycle (≤1, of its team)
│   │   ├── Sub-issues ── may live in a DIFFERENT project/team than the parent
│   │   ├── Relations ── Blocking / Blocked by / Related / Duplicate
│   │   ├── SLA (Business+) · Customer Requests · Comments · Documents · Attachments
│   │   └── Git branch name (issue ID embedded → auto-links PRs)
│   │
│   ├── WORKFLOW ──── the team's ordered set of issue statuses (each mapped to a type)
│   ├── CYCLE ──────── the team's repeating 1–8 week time-box (= sprint); auto-rollover
│   │   └── Cooldown ── optional buffer between cycles
│   └── TRIAGE ─────── the team's intake inbox (a special state type) — see §4.6
│
├── PROJECT  (outcome-scoped body of work; CAN SPAN MULTIPLE TEAMS)
│   ├── Lead · Members · Priority · Start/Target date · Status (Backlog/Planned/
│   │   In Progress/Completed/Canceled/Paused) · progress graph
│   ├── PROJECT MILESTONE ── ordered checkpoint inside one project (Alpha/Beta/GA)
│   └── PROJECT UPDATE ── periodic health: On track / At risk / Off track
│
├── INITIATIVE  (workspace-level; groups PROJECTS toward a strategic goal)
│   ├── Owner · Target date · Status (Proposed/Planned/Active/Completed/Canceled)
│   ├── SUB-INITIATIVES (nest; parent rolls up child projects)
│   └── INITIATIVE UPDATE ── rolls up contained project health
│   └── (was called "Roadmaps"; the roadmap TIMELINE is now a visualization/view)
│
├── VIEWS  (saved, filtered lenses over issues/projects/initiatives; workspace or team)
│   └── My Issues · Inbox · Insights panel
│
├── INSIGHTS  (Business+) ── native real-time analytics (Measure × Slice × Segment)
│
├── AGENTS PLATFORM  ── agents as first-class actors (Agent Interaction SDK, sessions)
├── MCP SERVER  (mcp.linear.app) · GraphQL API (api.linear.app/graphql)
│
└── CUSTOMER REQUESTS / ASKS  ── feedback + Slack intake feeding Triage

The single most important structural fact: planning happens on two independent axes. A Cycle is time-boxed, team-scoped, and recurring (momentum). A Project is outcome-scoped, finite, and can span teams (delivery). An issue can belong to one Cycle and one Project at once — they answer "when" and "toward what," not the same question. Collapsing them is the most common modeling error.

---

3. The five state types (universal spine)

Every status a team defines maps to exactly one of five workflow state TYPES (Linear says "types," not "categories"), plus Triage as a special intake type and Duplicate as a system status.

Rules an agent should know:

• Teams create any number of named statuses, each assigned to one of the five types; at least one status must exist per type. Behavior follows the type, not the name.
• Progress/completion math counts issues in the Completed type; Canceled issues are excluded from totals (Completed and Canceled are both "closed" but semantically opposite).
• Cycle rollover carries only issues that are not Completed/Canceled (and not moved to Backlog/Triage) into the next cycle.
• Default status for new issues must be a Backlog- or Unstarted-type status.
• Duplicate is a system-managed status (Canceled type), applied automatically when merging duplicates; it can't be renamed.

---

4. The distinctive concepts (what makes Linear not Jira)

If an agent internalizes one section, it should be this one.

4.1 Cycle vs Project — the two planning axes

• Cycle — a team's repeating, time-boxed planning period; Linear's word for a sprint. Configurable 1–8 weeks, fixed start day, auto-repeating. Team-scoped. Optional Cooldown buffer after each. Autopilot rollover: unfinished issues automatically move to the next cycle at cycle end (you cannot keep unfinished work in a closed cycle). Velocity/capacity computed from the previous 3 completed cycles. Up to 15 future cycles can be pre-created.
• Project — an outcome-scoped, finite body of work with a target date, lead, and its own status; can span multiple teams. Subdivided by Project Milestones. Carries Project Updates with health (On track / At risk / Off track).
• An issue can be in one Cycle and one Project simultaneously. Cycles answer "when"; Projects answer "toward what." This is the model's central fork.

4.2 Initiatives — the strategic layer above projects

Initiatives group multiple projects toward a company objective, can nest into sub-initiatives, and roll up project health via Initiative Updates. ("Roadmaps" was renamed to Initiatives; the roadmap timeline persists as a Gantt-style visualization of projects/initiatives.) Hierarchy: Initiative → Projects → Issues, running parallel to the team → cycle → issue execution axis.

4.3 Agents are first-class actors

Linear treats AI agents as workspace participants, not external callers — the clearest structural difference from most trackers:

• Agents can be @-mentioned, assigned, and delegated issues, and can create/reply to comments. Delegating an issue to an agent keeps the human teammate as primary owner (it still shows in their My Issues).
• An agent is a registered Application (OAuth app with webhooks). Auth uses OAuth2 with actor=app; scopes app:assignable / app:mentionable enable delegation/mentions. Admin scope is not available to app actors.
• Work runs as an AgentSession with a 6-state lifecycle (pending, active, error, awaitingInput, complete, stale) driven by 5 activity types emitted via agentActivityCreate: thought, action, response, elicitation, error. On a session created event the agent must emit an activity within 10 seconds or be marked unresponsive.
• Linear's own agent runs coding sessions (spec → code) and files issues from Intercom/Zendesk/Gong conversations into Triage. Status: active Developer Preview; building agents is free and they don't count as billable users.

4.4 Priority is a fixed 5-value enum, not a magnitude

No priority (0) · Urgent (1) · High (2) · Medium (3) · Low (4). The number is an enum identity, not a severity magnitude — a filter for priority ≤ 2 returns Urgent + High. A team setting controls whether "No priority" sorts first or last. Setting Urgent notifies the assignee. Project priority (added July 2024) uses the same scale. There is no custom priority scale — this is a deliberate non-configuration.

4.5 Estimates are team-chosen scales that all resolve to numbers

Four scales, enabled per team: Exponential (1,2,4,8,16), Fibonacci (1,2,3,5,8), Linear (1,2,3,4,5), T-shirt (XS,S,M,L,XL); extended scales add two more values. T-shirt sizes map to Fibonacci numbers for analytics (XS=1…XXXL=21). Un-estimated issues default to 1 point (configurable); an explicit 0 estimate is optionally allowed and is distinct from "unestimated." Estimates drive cycle/project % completion and cycle capacity.

4.6 Triage — a dedicated intake state

Incoming work doesn't land in a generic backlog — it lands in a per-team Triage inbox (a special state type). Issues enter Triage from integrations (Slack, Sentry, Intercom/Zendesk/Front), Asks, agents, non-team members, and the API. Keyboard actions: Accept (1) → default status; Mark duplicate (2) → merge; Decline (3) → Canceled; Snooze (H). Triage rules can require fields (e.g. priority) before an issue leaves, auto-route team/labels, and auto-delegate to an agent. On-call rotation integrates with PagerDuty/Opsgenie/Rootly/incident.io.

4.7 No native feature flags; native analytics is "Insights"

Linear has no native feature-flag capability (teams integrate external tools like LaunchDarkly). Its native analytics is Insights (Business+): real-time charts built as Measure × Slice × Segment over live issue data (see §7).

---

5. AI features and their gating

Gating rules an agent should know:

• Advanced AI intake (Triage Intelligence) tracks the Business/Enterprise tier alongside Insights, Asks, and SLAs. The AI page publishes no per-feature price table.
• The MCP server and the Agents platform are free to use and build against — agents don't count as billable users.

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6. The MCP server & API — how agents actually use Linear

Linear MCP server (official, remote-hosted)

Built with Cloudflare and Anthropic; remote-hosted.

• Endpoints: read-write https://mcp.linear.app/mcp (Streamable HTTP); read-only https://mcp.linear.app/mcp/readonly; deprecated legacy …/sse.
• Auth: OAuth 2.1 with dynamic client registration (interactive browser approval); also Bearer token, Linear API keys, and Enterprise SAML/Okta-managed auth.
• ~23–25+ tools for finding/creating/updating issues, projects, comments: listing (list_issues, list_projects, list_teams, list_cycles, list_comments, list_issue_labels, list_issue_statuses…), reading (get_issue, get_project, get_team, get_user…), writing (create_issue — also updates if id passed — update_issue, create_project, create_comment, create_issue_label), plus search_documentation.
• Clients: Claude (Connectors), Cursor, VS Code, Zed, Windsurf, Codex, Jules, v0. Multi-workspace needs separate auth contexts; subject to the underlying GraphQL rate limits.

GraphQL API

• Endpoint: https://api.linear.app/graphql (introspection supported). This is a GraphQL API — no REST.
• Auth: personal API key → Authorization: <API_KEY> (raw, no Bearer prefix); OAuth 2.0 → Authorization: Bearer <token>; app tokens for the agent/app-actor flow.
• SDK: @linear/sdk (TypeScript, fully typed). Mutations like issueCreate (input title/description/teamId), issueUpdate, agentActivityCreate.
• Rate limits (leaky bucket):

• Max complexity of a single query: 10,000 points (a larger query is always rejected). Headers: X-RateLimit-Requests-*, per-endpoint X-RateLimit-Endpoint-*, and X-Complexity / X-RateLimit-Complexity-*.
• Pagination: cursor-based Relay-style (first/after, pageInfo).
• Webhooks: subscribe to data-change events; agent events use AgentSessionEvent; team-access revocation emits PermissionChange.

---

7. Metrics — exact definitions

Linear's native analytics is Insights (Business/Enterprise only), reached via the right-sidebar panel (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+I) on team, project, cycle, and Custom Views. Most powerful on workspace-level Custom Views, which pull across all teams. An Insight = a Measure grouped by a Slice, optionally colored by Segments.

Measures and their exact definitions:

• Issue count — number of issues (bar).
• Effort — total estimate value (bar).
• Cycle Time — issue start → completion (entered a Started status → Completed); scatterplot.
• Lead Time — issue creation → completion; scatterplot.
• Triage Time — duration spent in Triage; scatterplot.
• Issue Age — time since creation; scatterplot.

Note Linear's exact definitions: cycle time = start → done; lead time = created → done. (Some agile tools define lead time differently — do not assume.) "Throughput" is not a named measure — it's captured via Issue count / Effort over time (burn-up) and cycle velocity.

Chart types: bar (count/effort), scatterplot (time measures), and burn-up / cumulative-flow (how work streams changed over time; monthly by default). Export: hover for exact values, select to filter, copy share link, or CSV.

Cycle metrics specifically:

• Progress = by estimate points if estimates are enabled, else by issue count; un-estimated issues use the team default (or 1).
• Velocity = issues/points completed across the previous 3 completed cycles; a capacity dial on upcoming cycles predicts completion likelihood.
• Rollover (Autopilot): open issues auto-carry to the next cycle; anything moved to Backlog/Triage/Canceled/Completed does not.
• SLAs (Business+): auto-apply deadlines by rule; a fire icon escalates gray → yellow → orange → red; first matching rule wins; subscribers notified 24h before breach and at breach; outcome recorded as Achieved or Failed. Default rules: Urgent → 24h, High → 1 week.

---

8. Roles and permissions

• Workspace Owner (Enterprise) — full control: billing, security, audit logs, exports, OAuth approvals; configures which roles perform workspace-level actions. Managed via a linear-owners group on new Enterprise setups.
• Admin — routine workspace administration; manage/suspend members. On the Free plan all users are Admins; on Business/Enterprise, Admin is narrower than Owner.
• Member — standard collaboration across accessible teams; cannot reach workspace-level admin pages.
• Guest (Business & Enterprise only) — access only the issues/projects/documents of teams they're explicitly added to; cannot see workspace-wide features, customer requests, initiatives, or Code Intelligence. Only team owners add guests. Guests are billed as regular members.
• Teams — public or private; private teams hide their content entirely from non-members. Team owners manage labels, templates, settings, membership.
• Enterprise identity — SAML/SSO and SCIM provisioning (IdP-managed membership); SAML/Okta also backs MCP managed auth.

Agents are installed apps, not users — they hold scopes (app:assignable, app:mentionable, customer:*, initiative:*) but never admin scope, and don't consume a seat.

---

9. Cycles vs Projects vs Initiatives — the containment model

Because this is Linear's most load-bearing (and most-confused) area, stated explicitly:

An issue in a cycle and a project is normal and expected. A Project Milestone is an in-project checkpoint, not a release tag and not an initiative.

---

10. Hard limits and constants (quick reference)

Current plan names: Free · Basic · Business · Enterprise (paid plans billed annually).

Other constants:

• Sub-teams: up to 5 levels deep (inherit parent workflow/cycles/labels).
• Cycles: length 1–8 weeks; up to 15 future cycles pre-creatable; velocity from last 3 completed cycles.
• Label groups: one level of nesting; up to 250 labels per group; single-select within a group (one label per group per issue).
• Priority: 5 fixed values (0–4). Estimate scales: 4, base tops out at 5 values (+2 extended).
• GraphQL: 5,000 req/hr; 3M (API key) / 2M (OAuth) complexity pts/hr; 10,000 max single-query complexity.
• Reserved label names (cannot be used): assignee, cycle, effort, estimate, hours, priority, project, state, status.

Issue identifier scheme: TEAM-123 = team key (usually 2–4 uppercase letters) + a per-team sequential integer. Moving an issue to another team assigns a brand-new identifier (new team key + that team's next number); the old ID/URL still resolves via redirect. IDs are effectively never reused within a team. IDs embedded in git branch names / PR titles are case-sensitive for matching.

---

11. Integrations

• GitHub / GitLab — copy a git branch name from an issue (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+.); embedding the issue ID auto-links the PR. Closing magic words (close/closes/fix/fixes/resolve/resolves/implements/… + ID) auto-transition the issue to done on merge; non-closing words (ref/part of/related to/…) link without completing; skip ENG-123 suppresses. PR-status automations (Team → Workflows & automations) trigger on drafted/opened/review-requested/ready/merged, with branch-specific regex rules (e.g. merge to staging → "In QA"). GitHub Issues Sync mirrors title/description/status/assignee/labels/sub-issues/comments.
• Slack — issue creation via message action, the @Linear agent (natural language), or /linear; bidirectional synced threads; team/project/initiative notifications; rich unfurls with inline actions.
• Customer-feedback tools — Intercom, Zendesk, Front, Salesforce (Enterprise), plus Slack and Asks feed Customer Requests (see §12/§13).
• Others — Figma, Sentry; preview links (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, Amplify) auto-attach to PRs (expire after 30 days of inactivity).
• Asks — Slack-based intake (Business+): turns Slack messages (and Enterprise web forms) into Triage issues with synced threads and templates; lets non-Linear users submit requests.

---

12. Gotchas an agent will otherwise get wrong

• Moving an issue to another team changes its ID. ENG-42 → DES-88; the old ID/URL redirect but the canonical ID is new. Never assume an ID is stable across a team move.
• Cycle ≠ Project ≠ Initiative. Cycle = time-boxed team sprint; Project = cross-team outcome; Initiative = strategic grouping of projects. An issue can be in a cycle and a project at once (§9).
• Sub-issues can live in a different project/team than their parent. Parent-child is a relationship, not containment — don't assume inheritance of team/project. (Sub-issues do inherit parent priority/project on creation, but not labels, and can diverge afterward.)
• Completed vs Canceled are opposite in metrics. Both are "closed," but Completed counts toward progress and Canceled is excluded. Duplicate is a separate system status (Canceled type), auto-applied, un-renamable.
• Triage vs Backlog. Triage is an inbox for un-accepted incoming work; Backlog is a workflow status for accepted-but-not-started work. Neither rolls over into cycles.
• Rollover only carries open/started issues. Moving something to Backlog/Triage/Canceled/Completed drops it from the next cycle.
• Turning estimates on/off changes reported completion %. Progress is by points when estimates are enabled (with defaults filling un-estimated issues), by issue count otherwise.
• Auto-close on PR merge depends on config. Magic words in the PR / issue ID in the branch drive it, with conditions like "only when merged to main." Merging any linked PR does not necessarily close the issue.
• The Free 250-issue cap counts active issues only. Archiving frees the count; archived issues stay searchable and can be included in Insights via a toggle.
• Private team content is invisible to non-members. An agent without team membership cannot see or query a private team's issues/projects at all.
• Priority numbers are enum identities, not magnitudes. 1 = Urgent (highest), 4 = Low; "No priority" = 0 and sorts first or last per a team setting.
• Don't map Jira 1:1. Linear intentionally lacks per-issue-type custom workflows, a schemes system, and a separate "sprint" object (it's a Cycle). Trying to reproduce Jira constructs will fail.
• The agent 10-second rule. On a session created event, an agent that doesn't emit an activity within 10 seconds is marked unresponsive.

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13. Vocabulary quick reference

Terms whose Linear meaning differs from generic agile, or that are Linear-specific:

• Workspace — the top-level company container (all teams, projects, initiatives).
• Team — the primary org unit; owns its own workflow, cycles, triage, labels; can nest into sub-teams (5 levels).
• Team key / identifier — the short uppercase prefix (e.g. ENG) in issue IDs and branch names.
• Issue — the fundamental unit of work; belongs to exactly one team.
• Sub-issue — a child issue; may live in a different project/team than its parent.
• Cycle — Linear's word for a sprint (repeating 1–8 week team period). Use "Cycle," not "Sprint."
• Cooldown — the optional buffer period between cycles.
• Project — an outcome-scoped body of work with a target date; can span teams.
• Project Milestone — an in-project checkpoint (not a release tag).
• Initiative — the strategic layer grouping projects (formerly "Roadmaps"); supports sub-initiatives.
• Triage — the per-team intake inbox; a special state type.
• Workflow — the team's ordered set of issue statuses (Linear's term; distinct from "automations," which are separate rules).
• State / status types — the five fixed buckets (Backlog / Unstarted / Started / Completed / Canceled) + Triage + Duplicate; custom status names map to a type.
• Estimate — the effort value; scales Exponential / Fibonacci / Linear / T-shirt; un-estimated defaults to 1.
• Priority — the fixed 5-value enum (No priority 0 / Urgent 1 / High 2 / Medium 3 / Low 4).
• View — a saved, filtered lens over issues/projects/initiatives; Custom Views can be workspace-wide and cross-team.
• Insights — the native analytics/charting feature (Business+).
• Customer Request — a captured piece of customer feedback linked to an issue/project; can attribute revenue and tier.
• Ask — the Slack/web intake surface turning external requests into Triage issues (Business+).
• Snooze — temporarily remove an issue/notification from view until a chosen time.
• Delegate (to agent) — assign an issue to an AI agent while the human teammate stays primary owner.
• AgentSession / activity types — the lifecycle (6 states) and emitted activities (thought/action/response/elicitation/error) of an agent working an issue.
• Autopilot — the automatic rollover of unfinished issues to the next cycle.
• Pulse — the AI digest of project/initiative updates (text or audio).

Unblocked Product Map

Unblocked — Product Map

A context engine — a read-mostly index over ~30 connected systems (SCM, Slack, Jira/Linear, Confluence/Notion, Datadog/Sentry, CI, Snowflake), served through MCP, PR review, a CI agent, chat, CLI, and an API. The things they do worth considering:

Work doesn't happen inside Unblocked, so every decision they hold is reconstructed after the fact. No capture at decision time, no provenance, no learning loop from rejected findings, no altitude above the item.

1. What Unblocked is, in one paragraph

Unblocked is a context engine for software engineering teams. It is not a tracker, not an IDE, and not a code generator at its core — it is a read-mostly synthesis layer that continuously indexes the systems where engineering knowledge already lives (source control, messaging, issue trackers, docs, incident tools, CI, and now data warehouses) and serves that synthesized context back through many surfaces: an MCP server for coding agents, automated PR review, a CI failure agent, Slack/Teams chat, a CLI, a web app, a Mac app, and a REST API. Its own positioning statement is the sharpest summary of its thesis: "Search tells you where information lives. Unblocked explains what it means." The product exists because AI coding agents write code that won't merge — not for lack of reasoning ability, but because the why behind a codebase was never written down in one place. Unblocked's job is to reconstruct that why, including reconciling sources that contradict each other, and hand it to both humans and agents with citations attached.

Why this framing matters

Unblocked is best understood as one index with many mouths. Nearly every feature — code review, the CI agent, MCP, chat, Unblocked Code — is a different consumer of the same underlying team index. That has two consequences an agent must internalize:

1. Product value is a function of connected sources, not of features. The docs repeatedly say reviews "become increasingly precise as you connect more context." Coverage of the organization, not the codebase, is the axis of quality.
2. The index is per-team and monolithic. All data sources connected to a team merge into one index; there is no sub-team partitioning. Isolation is achieved only by creating a separate Unblocked team (§10). This is the single most load-bearing structural fact in the product.

The unit of work is not an issue or a ticket — Unblocked has no work-tracking primitives at all. Its units are the question (with an answer and cited sources) and the connected data source.

---

2. The mental model — how the pieces relate

TEAM  (the top-level container — one company or one business unit)
│   ⚠ ONE team = ONE merged data index. No sub-team isolation. (§10)
│   Anyone with access to ANY connected source-code system gains access to the whole team.
│
├── DATA SOURCES  (~30 integrations across 9 categories) ─────────── the INPUT side
│   ├── Source Code Mgmt ── GitHub · GitHub Enterprise · GitLab · GitLab Self-Managed
│   │                       Bitbucket · Bitbucket Data Center · Azure DevOps
│   │                       (1 SCM on Code Review/Platform; MULTIPLE only on Enterprise)
│   ├── Documentation ───── Confluence (+DC) · Notion · Coda · Google Drive (+Workspaces)
│   │                       SharePoint · Stack Overflow for Teams · External Websites
│   ├── Project Mgmt ────── Jira (+DC) · Linear · Asana · Zendesk
│   ├── Messaging ───────── Slack · Microsoft Teams   (also OUTPUT surfaces — see below)
│   ├── Incident Mgmt ───── Datadog · Sentry
│   ├── Continuous Integ. ─ GitHub Actions · GitLab Pipelines · Bitbucket Pipelines
│   │                       Buildkite · CircleCI · (Jenkins — see §13 doc gotcha)
│   ├── Analytics ───────── PostHog
│   ├── Data Warehouse ──── Snowflake  (SQL context — BETA, read-only queries)
│   └── Custom ──────────── Collections + Documents via the public REST API
│
├── THE INDEX  ──────────── continuously synced; sync cadence varies by source (§6)
│   └── DATA SHIELD ─────── per-source toggle that enforces the SOURCE system's
│                           permissions on answers (Enterprise; OFF by default) (§8)
│
├── DELIVERY SURFACES  ──────────────────────────────────────────── the OUTPUT side
│   │
│   ├── UNBLOCKED MCP ───── for coding agents. TWO tools only: (§4)
│   │   ├── context_research   — multi-source research → summary + cited sources
│   │   └── context_get_urls   — resolve known URLs → full content
│   │   └── shipped BY the CLI binary; agent-side Skills teach agents to use it
│   │
│   ├── UNBLOCKED CLI ───── `unblocked`; 9 context-* commands, JSON on stdout (§5)
│   │   └── SUPERSET of MCP: adds 5 scoped searches + 2 structured queries
│   │
│   ├── CODE REVIEW ─────── automatic AI review on PR create/update (§7)
│   │   ├── PR Chat ──────── @unblocked → review / summarize / ask / diagram / write description
│   │   └── Risk Assessment ─ .unblocked/risk-policies.yaml → 5-level score → auto-approve
│   │
│   ├── CI FAILURE AGENT ── analyzes failed CI runs, posts fix suggestions on the PR
│   ├── CHAT ────────────── web · Mac app · Slack · Teams (§3)
│   │   └── Incognito Mode · Cited Sources · Internal Experts · Follow-ups
│   │   └── Skills (server-side) · Personal Memories · Answer Preferences · Presets
│   ├── UNBLOCKED CODE ──── remote background coding agent → draft PR (PRIVATE BETA)
│   └── PUBLIC REST API ─── Answers · Collections · Documents (getunblocked.com/api/v1)
│
├── ANALYTICS ──────────── usage dashboard: Answers · Review · CI · MCP · adoption
├── AUDIT LOGS ─────────── Enterprise only; from Sept 3, 2025; CSV export
└── ADMIN ──────────────── RBAC (Admin/Member) · SSO+SCIM · licensing · billing

The single most important structural fact after the one-index rule: the MCP surface and the CLI surface are backed by the same engine, but they are not the same size. MCP exposes 2 tools; the CLI exposes 9 commands, including structured issue/PR queries that have no MCP equivalent (§5). An agent that only has MCP cannot do everything a script with the CLI can.

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3. The question — Unblocked's actual unit of work

Unblocked has no issues, sprints, or statuses. Its primitive is the question, and everything in the chat product is a modifier on how a question gets answered.

The answer object. Every answer carries cited sources — links back to the exact file, PR, doc, issue, or message consulted, resolving into the origin system. Citations are the trust mechanism and are treated as mandatory; a July 31, 2026 bug fix specifically corrected the MCP service discarding valid answers that came back without citations.

Four stacked layers shape any given answer. An agent reasoning about "why did Unblocked answer that way" should check all four:

Research Depth is the one that changes cost and latency: "thorough" enables multiple retrieval and reasoning steps. It is the chat-side analogue of the MCP/CLI effort parameter.

Other question-level concepts:

• Incognito Mode — answers visible only to you. On by default. Platform/Enterprise plans. A private answer can be promoted to Public afterward. If Data Shield is enabled, Incognito is forced ON for everyone, permanently.
• Internal Experts — for each question Unblocked names the teammates who know the topic best (derived from authorship/activity) and lets you @name them into the thread; they get notified and can join. This is the product's one genuinely social feature.
• Follow-up questions — suggested after every answer; carry prior context.
• My Questions — the personal history view (web + Mac), with mark-as-unread.
• File uploads — max 5 files; documents (.pdf/.docx/.pptx/.xlsx/.csv/.htm/.html/.txt/.md) up to 3 MB each; images (.png/.jpg/.jpeg) up to 5 MB each. Thread-scoped only — never stored as team data, never visible in other threads.
• Diagrams — Unblocked renders Mermaid: flowcharts, sequence, class, ERD, and anything else Mermaid supports. Available in chat and in PR Chat.
• Source exclusion — two mechanisms: (a) Archive a cited source from the answer UI (with an optional reason, listed on the Recently Archived page), or (b) put a tag in the document title. Supported tags: deprecated, archived, outdated, wrapped in [], (), or <>. Case-insensitive in practice ([DEPRECATED], (Archived), <outdated> all work).

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4. Unblocked MCP — the agent-facing surface

This is the strategic center of the current product, and it is deliberately, aggressively small.

The two tools

That's the entire tool surface. There is no write path — no create-issue, no post-message, no update-anything. MCP is read-only context injection.

The five-tool → two-tool migration (April 2026)

unblocked_context_engine, research_task, data_retrieval, historical_context, and link_resolver were removed (a declared breaking change) in the April 24, 2026 release and replaced by the two tools above. Any config or prompt hand-referencing the old names is broken and must be migrated. MCP went GA May 1, 2026.

Installation and transport

• One-liner: curl -fsSL https://getunblocked.com/install-mcp.sh | bash — auto-detects and configures every supported agent it finds, and installs agent-side Skills.
• The MCP server is a mode of the CLI binary: unblocked mcp runs JSON-RPC over stdio. It is a local process, not a hosted remote endpoint you point a URL at — with one exception: the docs point Windows users to a remote MCP server, which is otherwise undocumented (§13).
• Supported clients: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, JetBrains IDEs (incl. GitHub Copilot on IntelliJ), OpenCode, VS Code, Windsurf, "other."
• Auth: unblocked auth (OAuth, browser or device-code) or an API token for headless use (§5).

Agent-side Skills (≠ server-side Skills — see §13)

Open-source prompt packages in github.com/unblocked/skills, following the Agent Skills specification (agentskills.io). Each MCP tool has a corresponding skill: "where tools provide capabilities, skills provide the judgment to use them well."

• Canonical install location: ~/.agents/skills/, symlinked into each agent's own directory (~/.claude/skills/, ~/.cursor/skills/, ~/.codeium/windsurf/skills/).
• Auto-updating: every CLI run re-fetches the latest skills from GitHub. If you modify a skill locally, the CLI detects the change and permanently stops updating that specific skill — customizations are never overwritten, but they also never get upstream fixes.
• Install paths: the install script, unblocked install-skills, the Claude Code plugin marketplace (/plugin marketplace add unblocked/skills), npx skills add unblocked/skills, or manual copy.
• The Unblocked Cookbook (github.com/unblocked/cookbook) holds composable recipes — code review, planning, ticket enrichment, bug validation, incident investigation — in interactive and headless variants, designed to be forked and run in CI.
• Recommended CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md snippet: use context_research before planning or modifying unfamiliar code, and context_get_urls to resolve links.

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5. The CLI — the superset surface

unblocked is a single binary that (a) runs the MCP server, (b) installs skills, and (c) exposes context as standalone commands. Every context-* command returns a single JSON document on stdout, designed for jq, scripts, and CI. GA May 1, 2026.

Command surface

Search results carry sourceType (code \| documentation \| issue \| message \| pull_request) and provider (github \| jira \| slack \| notion \| …). For the context-query-* commands, content is the raw provider record encoded as a JSON string, deliberately so the shape can evolve per provider without breaking the envelope. Errors return {"error": "CODE", "message": "..."} with a non-zero exit code.

Auth, in precedence order

UNBLOCKED_API_TOKEN (env) → UNBLOCKED_API_TOKEN_FILE (secret mount, recommended) → the Unblocked credential file (~/.unblocked/auth/agent-token). Interactive OAuth caches to macOS Keychain, or ~/.unblocked/auth/oauth-refresh-token on Linux (owner-only permissions). The CLI does not load .env files.

Platform support

macOS and glibc-based Linux, x64 and arm64 (Linux support landed July 31, 2026). Not supported: Alpine/musl, 32-bit Linux, Windows. Binary lands in ~/.local/bin/ if not on PATH.

Two install scripts, and the difference matters: install-mcp.sh = CLI + IDE configs + skills + auth prompt; install.sh = binary only, no IDE config, no skills, no auth — pick it when you don't want Unblocked reaching into IDE configs.

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6. Data sources and sync cadence — exact numbers

Unblocked keeps everything in sync automatically; you never trigger a re-sync. But cadence varies enormously by source, and this is the most common source of "why is Unblocked's answer stale?"

Source-specific caveats worth carrying:

• Azure DevOps: Git only — TFVC is not supported, and ADO work items are not indexed.
• Google Drive: plain-text files up to 5 MB (raised from 200 KB on July 31, 2026); ingests .docx/.xlsx/.pptx alongside native formats, plus Google Sheets (with cell hyperlinks) and Slides speaker notes. Admins can exclude folders and purge already-ingested content.
• External Websites: authenticated sites — including login-gated GitHub Pages — cannot be added.
• Zendesk: requires an administrator account; agent-level tokens are rejected by Zendesk's brand/export APIs.
• Snowflake: requires a dedicated read-only role + user and a custom OAuth security integration (redirect URI https://getunblocked.com/api/auth/snowflake/exchange), restricted via ALLOWED_ROLES_LIST. Refresh token validity in the documented setup: 7,776,000 s (90 days).

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7. Code Review — the mechanics

Automatic review on every PR create or update, for selected repositories only. Typical completion: within three minutes, size-dependent.

What happens before findings are generated (this pre-processing is the differentiator vs. generic PR bots):

1. Reads existing comment threads to avoid repeating findings already resolved — or already made by itself.
2. Surfaces related Slack and Microsoft Teams conversations referencing the PR.
3. Uses web search to fact-check claims about package dependencies and external facts before reporting (added May 22, 2026, explicitly to cut false positives from stale training data).

What is excluded automatically:

• Binary files.
• Generated and vendored files — read from your repo's .gitattributes, honoring GitHub Linguist markers (linguist-generated, linguist-vendored). No new config needed if you already use Linguist.
• Bot-authored PRs (Dependabot, service accounts) — but you can still request a manual review with @unblocked.
• Draft PRs, by default. Team admins can flip the default; individual devs can override in personal preferences.
• Custom excluded paths — glob patterns (*.md, src/test/**, node_modules/*, package-lock.json, .generated.js).

Comment forms: suggested changes (GitHub/GHE only, one-click apply, on by default since May 1, 2026) for small fixes; descriptive comments for anything requiring judgment.

Custom rules: Unblocked reads repository instructions from a broad set of existing rule files — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and directories like .cursor/rules, .github/instructions, .claude/rules. The docs are pointed that good rules are factual and specific ("Use Money for monetary values; avoid floating-point arithmetic") and that vague truisms ("Review API changes carefully") are worthless.

Automated approval (setting, three options): Auto-approve (default) · Comment ("No issues found") · Silent.

Risk Assessment

Runs only after a review completes with no issues found. Reads .unblocked/risk-policies.yaml from the default branch — never from the PR's own proposed policy changes, so a PR cannot lower its own risk. Emits a score of lowest · low · medium · high · highest plus an explanation.

• Each policy is evaluated independently; when multiple match, the highest risk wins.
• Schema: policies (required, ≥1) with policy (2–80 chars), risk (the 5-value enum), criteria (2–4,000 chars); optional top-level context (2–4,000 chars) for stable repo background. additionalProperties: false.
• Only low and lowest result in approval. Risk-based auto-approval (May 29, 2026) explicitly cannot auto-approve medium/high/highest, and a failed risk assessment blocks auto-approval entirely.
• Renders on GitHub, Bitbucket (text+emoji), and Azure DevOps (HTML fallback).

PR Chat

@unblocked + natural language (not fixed commands). Unblocked reacts 👀 to acknowledge, then posts. Capabilities: review (incl. focused re-reviews — "review just src/auth/session.ts again"), ask questions about the code or the broader system, summarize, write/update the PR description in place, and generate diagrams. A manual review request always triggers a fresh review, even if one already exists for that commit.

Auto-generated PR descriptions lead with a Context section — a sourced summary of why the change was made, drawn from linked issues, prior PRs, design docs, and conversations, with links back. On for all orgs by default since July 3, 2026.

Feedback loop: 👍/👎 reactions or replies tune future reviews; adaptive learning also mines historical PR conversations for conventions, and cites the original PR conversation when a review comment draws on past discussion.

CI Failure Agent

When a connected CI job fails on a PR, Unblocked analyzes the logs and posts a report — only when it has high confidence in the root cause. Providers: GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, Bitbucket Pipelines, Buildkite, CircleCI, and Jenkins (via the unblocked Jenkins plugin; see §13). Bitbucket/GitLab require a bot account to post on behalf of. Developers can opt out per-user in Personal Settings.

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8. Security, permissions, and Data Shield

Data Shield is the permission-enforcement layer, and its default is the thing most likely to surprise you:

Data Shield is OFF by default for every data source — including newly connected ones. Each source must be enabled individually.

When enabled for a source, answers only draw on material the asking user is authorized to see in the origin system. It is an Enterprise-plan feature.

Sources Data Shield supports (20): Asana, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket (+DC), Coda, Confluence (+DC), GitHub (+GHE), GitLab (+Self-Managed), Google Drive (+Workspaces), Jira (+DC), Linear, Microsoft Teams, Notion, PostHog, Slack.

Sources Data Shield does NOT support — content from these is visible to every team member regardless: Datadog, External Websites, Sentry, Stack Overflow.

Sources requiring extra admin setup for identity mapping: GitHub/GHE (domain verification, needs an org owner who can make DNS changes), Confluence (+DC), Google Drive (must connect Google Drive for Workspaces, not plain Drive), Jira (+DC).

If Unblocked can't match a user's identity for a protected source, it prompts them to connect that account before answering. Enabling Data Shield forces Incognito Mode permanently on for all members.

Identity linking is the user-side counterpart: each person links their GitHub/Jira/Slack/Confluence/etc. accounts under Settings › Personal Settings › User Accounts, which powers "what are my open PRs" and tailors answers to the code you actually work on. You cannot unlink the account you're currently logged in with.

RBAC is minimal: a single Admin / Member binary, and it is off by default. Its scope is narrow — enabling it means only admins can configure data sources and change team settings. ⚠ With RBAC off, any user can add/remove repos and change Confluence, Google Drive, and Slack connections.

SSO/SCIM (Enterprise): Okta, Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, AWS Identity Center, PingOne, and any SAML 2.0 provider. SCIM handles provisioning/deprovisioning and supports the Enterprise User Schema Extension fields (employeeNumber, costCenter, organization, division, department).

Data handling posture: encrypted in transit and at rest with customer-specific encryption keys. SOC 2 Type II, CASA Tier II, GDPR. Removing a repo or integration immediately removes the associated data; deleting the account removes everything. Training claim is unusually broad and explicit: "Your code, documentation, and questions are never used to train or fine-tune AI models — not by Unblocked, and not by the third-party model providers." Cloud-hosted by default; on-premises deployment available for Enterprise. The trust center (trust.getunblocked.com) is the authoritative source; which LLM providers Unblocked uses, and data residency, are not disclosed in the docs.

Audit Logs (Enterprise; Admin-only when RBAC is on): every significant team-settings and data-source action, with timestamp, actor, and description. Categories: Data Source · Continuous Integration · Team Setting · Question events. Searchable and filterable by date/actor/category, exportable as CSV. Event recording began September 3, 2025 — nothing before that date exists.

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9. Plans, licensing, and limits

Three plans (the ladder is cumulative)

Free trial: 21 days with full Enterprise features, no credit card.

⚠ The docs are internally inconsistent about plan names — Incognito Mode says "Platform or Enterprise," while Answer Preferences says "Business or Enterprise." There is no Business plan in the plan list; "Business" appears to be a stale name for Platform (§13).

Licensing — what makes a user "active"

A license is consumed when a user becomes active, defined precisely as:

• Asking a question in the web app, Mac app, or via MCP with an account.
• Asking a 4th question in Slack without an account (first 3 are free; automated Slack auto-answers never require a license).
• Receiving a CI report or Code Review on a 4th pull request within a monthly billing period, with or without an account — this one auto-assigns a license, no prompt.

License approval is a team setting: auto-approve (optionally capped — "require manual approval after n licenses") or manual approval. Admins can pre-assign licenses before a user has an account, and can self-claim or self-remove a seat. Removing a license leaves the user's access to the team and their past questions intact.

Hard limits (quick reference)

These are described as "guardrails against abuse, not a measure of expected usage" — raisable on request.

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10. Teams and data isolation — the containment model

Stated explicitly because it is the product's most consequential and least intuitive rule:

• Each Unblocked team has its own separate data index. All data sources connected to a team — including multiple SCMs — merge into that single index.
• Any user with access to any one of the team's source-code data sources automatically gains access to the entire team environment. Access is not per-repo; it is a boolean at the team boundary. (Data Shield narrows what answers cite, not whether you're in the team.)
• The only isolation primitive is a separate team. If questions in business unit A must never draw on business unit B's data, you create two Unblocked teams. There is no sub-team, workspace, or project-level partition.
• Consolidating teams is destructive. To merge two teams' data sources you must delete one team first, then re-add its sources to the survivor. There is no merge operation.
• Multiple source-code systems on one team are Enterprise-only.

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11. Unblocked Code — the write path (private beta)

The one place Unblocked produces code rather than context. Private beta, free during beta, access by request.

• A remote background coding environment. Tasks run remotely and survive closing Unblocked or shutting down your machine; sized for work "the latest frontier AI coding models can typically complete within a few hours."
• Invoked wherever you already chat: @Unblocked in Slack, the web/Mac app, or a PR comment. Flow: confirm the task → track it (status/list/cancel) → review the draft PR.
• It consumes the Context Engine — code, PRs, issues, docs, discussions — and only the data sources the requesting user is permitted to access.
• ⚠ GitHub.com organization-owned repositories only. Other SCMs "coming soon"; personal repos not supported.
• Requires a separate "Unblocked Code" GitHub App installed per org (install with All repositories) for write access, plus a one-time per-user authorization to open PRs on their behalf, revocable via GitHub.
• Environment: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, cloud-init Bash scripts only (no cloud-config YAML), running as root (no sudo needed). Secrets are exposed as env vars only while the script runs; repo-specific secrets override shared ones of the same name.
• Egress IPs for allowlisting: 44.236.159.233/32 and 44.255.222.154/32.
• Debugging: Connect via SSH spins an ephemeral machine (user ubuntu, with sudo) reproducing the environment but not running the agent; troubleshoot via /var/log/cloud-init-output.log. Changes made on the machine are not saved — copy them into the cloud-init script. Auto-destroys after 4 hours.

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12. The public REST API

Base URL https://getunblocked.com/api/v1. Auth: Authorization: Bearer <token>. Two token types, both scopeable to specific data sources at creation:

• Personal Access Token — scoped to your account; 1,000 calls/day.
• Team Access Token — ⚠ grants access to all documents in your team's data sources. The docs flag rotation explicitly.

Three resource families:

1. Collections (create/get/list/update/delete) — a group of related documents from a source Unblocked doesn't natively support (a custom support tool, an internal wiki). Max 25 per team. Also creatable in the UI via Data Sources › Create a Custom Source.
2. Documents (put/list/delete) — collectionId, title, body (plain text or Markdown), uri. A document is uniquely identified by its uri, which is also the link target used in citations. PUT is upsert-by-URI.
3. Answers (ask/retrieve/list/delete) — asynchronous by design. PUT /answers/{questionId} with a globally unique UUID you generate → 204 No Content (queued). Then GET /answers/{questionId} → {"state":"processing"} until {"state":"complete","result":{"answer":"…","references":[{"htmlUrl":"…"}]}}. Answers are Markdown.

Errors are {"status": <code>}. 400 bad request · 401 missing/invalid/expired token · 403 insufficient permission · 404 not found or no access · 429 rate limited · 500 server error · 502/504 upstream. 502 and 504 are transient — retry with a short delay. 500 may be transient but retry isn't guaranteed.

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13. Gotchas an agent will otherwise get wrong

• "Skills" means two entirely different things. Server-side Skills (/skills) are SKILL.md instructions stored in Unblocked's Settings that shape how Unblocked answers your questions in Slack/web/Mac. Agent-side Skills (/unblocked-mcp/skills) are open-source prompt packages from github.com/unblocked/skills installed to ~/.agents/skills/ that teach your coding agent how to call Unblocked's MCP tools. Same word, same spec (Agent Skills), opposite directions. Never conflate them.
• One team = one index; access is all-or-nothing at the team boundary. Access to any single connected SCM grants the whole team environment. Isolation requires separate teams, and merging teams requires deleting one (§10).
• Data Shield is OFF by default for every source, including new ones. Connecting a source does not inherit its permissions until you toggle it on, per source. And four sources (Datadog, Sentry, Stack Overflow, External Websites) can never be permission-scoped.
• RBAC is also off by default. Until enabled, any user can add/remove repositories and rewire Confluence, Google Drive, and Slack connections.
• Code index lags by up to 8 hours, and only covers the default branch. Answers, search, and MCP read this index — so an agent asking about code that only exists on a feature branch will be told it doesn't exist. Code Review, the CI agent, the MCP server, and the CLI read the default branch directly and are current; questions and answers go through the 8-hour index. These are different freshness paths.
• MCP ≠ CLI in capability. MCP has 2 tools; the CLI has 9 commands. The five scoped context-search- searches and both structured context-query- commands are CLI-only with no MCP equivalent.
• The legacy 5-tool MCP surface is gone. unblocked_context_engine, research_task, data_retrieval, historical_context, link_resolver were removed April 2026. Any hand-written reference to them is broken.
• MCP is read-only. There is no write tool — no creating issues, posting messages, or updating records. The only write path in the whole product is Unblocked Code (§11) and the Documents API.
• Data Source Presets do NOT apply to MCP. They govern Q&A on web/Mac/messaging only. When an agent calls context_research, it searches all data sources the token or user can reach — so a preset that hides #sales from your chat answers does nothing for your coding agent.
• GitHub auto-approvals do not satisfy branch protection. Unblocked isn't a member of your org, so its approval does not count toward required approvals. Treat it as a pass signal, keep a human reviewer.
• Risk Assessment only runs when the review found nothing. It is not a parallel signal on every PR — it's a second stage gated on a clean review. And it reads the policy from the default branch, so a PR can't lower its own risk score.
• Only low and lowest can auto-approve. Medium/high/highest always require a human, and a failed risk assessment blocks approval entirely.
• --urls must be repeated per URL. --urls "a" "b" is rejected; use --urls "a" --urls "b".
• Locally modified agent-side skills stop receiving updates — permanently and silently. Great for customization, a quiet staleness trap otherwise.
• Uploaded files are thread-scoped and never become team data. Don't expect an uploaded PDF to be searchable later or from another thread.
• Datadog logs/metrics/monitors and Snowflake tables are queried live, not indexed. Everything else in the product is index-mediated. Latency and failure modes differ accordingly.
• Azure DevOps: no TFVC, and work items are never indexed — connecting ADO gets you code and PRs only, not its issue tracker.
• External Websites re-crawl only every ~7 days, and cannot be authenticated. A docs-site change can take a week to appear in answers.
• Slack's first backfill can take hours on large channels, and answers will be partial until it finishes.
• Incognito Mode is on by default, and Data Shield forces it on permanently for everyone.
• Auto-response is per channel, not per thread. To silence Unblocked in one thread you must set the whole channel to "Don't auto-respond."
• Audit logs start September 3, 2025. No earlier history exists, regardless of when the team was created.
• The 10,000/day MCP limit is scoped differently by token type — per organization for Team tokens, per organization member for Personal tokens/OAuth/desktop. Same number, very different headroom.
• Plan-name inconsistency in the docs. The plan list is Code Review / Platform / Enterprise, but the Answer Preferences and writing-questions pages gate features on a "Business" plan that doesn't exist in that list. Treat "Business" as stale for Platform.
• Jenkins is documented but unlisted. The CI Failure Agent page's intro names five providers (Bitbucket Pipelines, Buildkite, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines), yet the same page contains a full Jenkins setup tab with a dedicated Jenkins plugin, and Jenkins appears in neither the Data Sources overview nor llms.txt. Jenkins support is real; the indexes just don't reflect it.
• A remote MCP server exists but is undocumented. The CLI install page tells Windows users to "connect an IDE or agent to Unblocked's remote MCP server," and a June 26, 2026 fix references "remote Unblocked MCP tools" being blocked by SAML re-auth. No page documents its URL, transport, or auth. Everything else describes MCP as a local stdio process.
• Three live pages are missing from llms.txt — see below. An agent that trusts the index alone will never find Personal Memories.

Doc bugs found (worth reporting)

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14. Release cadence and trajectory

Unblocked ships weekly, on Fridays, with a public changelog (32 entries from Nov 18, 2025 through July 31, 2026 — essentially unbroken weekly cadence).

The arc of the last twelve months, as an agent should read it:

• Nov 2025 – Mar 2026 — Core chat, code review, and data-source breadth. Licensing self-service.
• April 2026 — the agent pivot. Standalone CLI ships; the 5-tool MCP surface collapses to 2; structured context-query-* commands appear; Sentry/Datadog become context sources. This is the release where Unblocked stops being "chat about your code" and becomes "context infrastructure for agents."
• May 1, 2026 — GA. MCP, CLI, and incident management (Datadog + Sentry) all go generally available together.
• May–June 2026 — review gets serious. Risk Assessment with repo-level .unblocked/risk-policies.yaml, risk-based auto-approval, web-search fact-checking, existing-comment awareness. Server-side Skills ship (June 12).
• July 2026 — surface and depth expansion. SharePoint GA; Snowflake SQL context (beta) — the first time Unblocked answers from data rather than documents about data; Zendesk; Linux CLI; OpenCode; code index freshness 12h → 8h.

Direction of travel: breadth of connected sources (now including warehouses and support tooling), depth in automated review (risk policy → conditional auto-approval), and — via Unblocked Code — a first cautious move from reading context to writing code. The unresolved edges are the undocumented remote MCP server, the GitHub-only limitation on Unblocked Code, and the absence of any write-capable MCP tool.

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15. Vocabulary quick reference

Terms whose Unblocked meaning is specific, or that are easy to confuse:

• Context engine — Unblocked's self-description; explicitly contrasted with a search index. Search locates documents; a context engine reconciles across sources (including contradictory ones) and explains meaning.
• Team — the top-level container and the only isolation boundary. One team = one merged data index.
• Data source — any connected external system. ~30 across 9 categories.
• Data Shield — the permission-enforcement layer mirroring source-system access. Per-source, off by default, Enterprise.
• Data Source Preset — a named, team-shared subset of sources/documents used to scope answers. Applies to chat, not to MCP.
• Answer Preferences — per-user controls: Data Sources · Answer Length · Answer Tone · Research Depth.
• Research Depth / effort — the same idea in two places: trade latency for a more exhaustive multi-step search. effort is low|medium|high on the CLI/MCP.
• Cited Sources — the mandatory links back to origin material under every answer.
• Archive (a source) — permanently exclude a specific document from future answers, with an optional reason. Listed under Recently Archived.
• Internal Experts — teammates Unblocked identifies as knowing a topic, @-mentionable into the answer thread.
• Incognito Mode — answers private to you. On by default; forced on when Data Shield is enabled.
• Personal Memories — durable per-user preferences (role, language, verbosity) applied automatically. Private one-on-one conversations only — never in public Slack/Teams channels, and switched off the moment a conversation is made public or someone else joins. Shape delivery only; never override source data. Pattern-learned memories can take up to a day to take effect.
• Skills (server-side) — SKILL.md instructions in Unblocked Settings shaping how Unblocked answers. Personal or shared-team; a personal skill overrides a shared team skill of the same name; admins can promote personal → shared.
• Skills (agent-side) — open-source prompt packages teaching your coding agent how to use Unblocked MCP well. ~/.agents/skills/, auto-updating.
• Cookbook — github.com/unblocked/cookbook; forkable recipes composing agent-side skills (code review, planning, ticket enrichment, bug validation, incident investigation), interactive and headless.
• context_research — the multi-source research MCP tool. Returns summary + sources.
• context_get_urls — the URL-resolution MCP tool. Retrieval, not discovery.
• PR Chat — the @unblocked natural-language interface inside pull requests.
• Risk policy — .unblocked/risk-policies.yaml, read from the default branch, scoring PRs lowest→highest.
• Suggested change — a one-click-applicable inline fix block. GitHub/GHE only.
• CI Failure Agent — posts root-cause analysis on failed CI runs, only at high confidence.
• Unblocked Code — the remote background coding agent producing draft PRs. Private beta, GitHub-org repos only.
• Collection — an API-created group of documents from an unsupported source. Max 25/team.
• Document (API) — a title/body/uri record; uri is the unique key and the citation target.
• Active member — the licensing trigger: asking a question (web/Mac/MCP), a 4th Slack question without an account, or a 4th PR receiving review/CI reports.
• SQL context — the Snowflake beta: Unblocked maps schema and runs read-only live queries to answer from data itself.