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Start work from issues and PRs #28
Description
Start work from issues and PRs: pickers when starting work, and ace:// links.
Status
#109 (closing #107) shipped Open in a channel on Issues and PRs rows. It creates a channel in the selected project whose first message asks the agent to work on the issue, or to continue the PR. The two-person study confirmed it for issues (scenario 9).
Remaining
- Show who's on it: an issue or PR row shows the channels already working on it, including teammates'. In the study, a teammate couldn't tell from the issue that someone was already working on it.
- Continue a PR: check at runtime that "Open in a channel" on a PR continues on the PR's branch through the agent's instruction.
-
ace://links: to open an issue, PR or channel.
Out of scope: taking over an existing local branch or PR branch as the channel's lane. Lanes stay new branches.
Dogfooding core/QOL: #5. Also tracked in #6 for old-Ace feature parity. Migrated from TODO.md — Port from old Ace.
Activity
iamnbutler commentedon Oct 15, 2026
Two-person study (#218, scenario 9) on Canary 0.0.27: Tester B used Open in a channel on toddler-game-center#4. Ace created a channel, posted a request to implement it, and started the agent without further input; the agent renamed the channel
keyboard-playable-gamesand opened PR #7 as B (about 5 minutes). Tester A found the channel under B's section of the same project with a link to #4 in its details.Gap: on A's Mac the issue #4 entry in Ace showed nothing about B's channel, even after refresh (confusion 2/3). A teammate can't tell from an issue that someone is already working on it.
[-]Start work from issues, PRs, and existing branches[/-][+]Start work from issues and PRs[/+]iamnbutler commentedon Oct 15, 2026
Narrowed: taking over existing branches is out of scope. What remains: showing who's working on an issue or PR, verifying PR continuation, and
ace://links.iamnbutler commentedon Oct 22, 2026
From the 2026-10-22 map study (gh rig: loopback source host from origin/main, 0.0.53 code, signed in with
ghon githubnext/ace-testbed):add-moon) madeamber-orbit, whose lane branch wasamber-orbit/add-moon. The details sidebar said "No pull request" and, once the agent had a change, offered Create PR, which would open a duplicate. On GitHub nothing new was pushed. The PR shows in the sidebar only as "Links: feat(app): open a Diff tab in the background once a channel has changes #2" (^738, ^391).