Tasks

One agent, one prompt, one deliverable. That's a task.

Every piece of work in Busy Bee (a research note, a landing page, a blog post, a code change, a recurring summary, a workflow step) eventually becomes a task. Tasks are how the daemon picks up work, how agents track what they're doing, and how you see what's happening on the Work board.

The shape of a task

Every task has:

• A title and description - what the work is.
• An agent - who's doing it. Either explicitly assigned, or chosen by Queen Bee.
• A status - PENDING, IN_PROGRESS, DONE, FAILED, CANCELLED, or AWAITING_APPROVAL.
• A priority - LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH, URGENT. Higher-priority tasks are picked up first when agents are bottlenecked.
• Optional context - extra structured data the agent should know (audience, constraints, source URLs).
• Optional requirements - explicit shape of the deliverable (format, length, tone).
• A project (optional) - most tasks belong to one; standalone tasks live on the Work board.
• A schedule (optional) - set a future time the task should run, or attach it to a recurring template.

You rarely fill all of these by hand. The chat input fills most of them inferentially; you can edit any of them in the task detail view.

How tasks get created

Five paths into the task table:

1. From the chat input on the Work board, the most common path.
2. From a workflow: each stage becomes a task.
3. From a recurring template: every scheduled run creates a fresh task.
4. From the API: useful for external triggers (CI, cron, integrations).
5. From an agent: agents can spawn sub-tasks for themselves or for teammates as part of a hand-off.

Regardless of the path, the resulting task looks identical on the Work board.

Task lifecycle

A task moves through these states in order:

1. PENDING: created, waiting in the queue.
2. IN_PROGRESS: an agent has picked it up and is working.
3. AWAITING_APPROVAL: agent has produced a deliverable; the task is paused for your sign-off.
4. DONE: you approved, or the task ran to completion without an approval gate.

Side states: FAILED (something went wrong; surfaced for retry) and CANCELLED (you stopped it).

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