Turn
An issue tracker usually has one axis: the status. Backlog, Todo, In Progress, Done. It reads as a timeline, left to right, and that is how teams of people have always used it.
When AI agents do most of the steps, the timeline stops being the question you actually have. A feature now goes from a writer agent to a reviewer agent, then to you for a PR review, then to an agent deploying to staging, then back to you to confirm, then to an agent again. The step changes every hour. What you want to know at nine in the morning is simpler: is anything waiting on me?
Bonsai answers that with a second axis.
Where this stands. The board groups issues by Turn, Issue types list their states under the four Turns, and Automation dispatches a role as soon as an issue reaches an Agent’s turn state, then stops when it’s your turn.
Four turns
Every issue is, at any moment, in exactly one of four turns:
| Turn | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Todo | Nobody is moving it: it is queued, or blocked by something outside the project |
| Agent’s turn | An agent is working on it, or should be dispatched now |
| Your turn | It is waiting on a person |
| Closed | Nobody needs to look at it again |
Turn is built into Bonsai. You cannot rename the four or add a fifth. That is on purpose: the board, the dispatcher and the agents all rely on the same four words meaning the same thing.
Turn is whose move it is, not a unit of work. Coding agents such as Codex call one execution inside a session a “turn”; Bonsai never uses the word that way. One dispatch of an agent on an issue is a run, and one pass through review is a round. A run happens during an agent’s turn; a round may span an agent’s turn and yours.
Statuses are yours
Under each turn sit the statuses, and those you define. A status names a step in the process; its turn says who holds the ball during that step. The built-in Feature type looks like this:
| Turn | Statuses |
|---|---|
| Todo | Backlog, Blocked, Ready |
| Agent’s turn | Developing, Reviewing, Revising, Deploying to Staging, Deploying to Production |
| Your turn | Review PR, Verify Staging, Needs Decision |
| Closed | Done, Canceled, Duplicate |
Read the feature’s life as a sequence and the turn flips back and forth:
Ready → Developing → Reviewing → Review PR → Deploying to Staging → Verify Staging → Deploying to Production → Done
Bold is the agent’s turn, italics are yours. That bouncing is the normal shape of work with agents, not an exception. The turn axis is what makes it legible.
A status belongs to one turn, so the rule for who acts is never ambiguous:
- A status in Agent’s turn has an automation row in the issue type: when the issue arrives, that row says which role to dispatch.
- A status in Your turn has no row. Nothing runs until you move the issue.
- Todo statuses wait for scheduling: dependencies done, a free machine, or an outside blocker lifted.
- Automation never moves an issue into Closed. Finishing is a human act.
Like statuses in Issue types, the names are yours. Bug can call its first status Triage and close with Won’t Fix; the turns underneath stay the same.
The board
The issues board groups by turn, and Your turn is the leftmost column. Open a project and the first thing you see is what is waiting on you. The next column is what agents are doing right now. Todo and Closed follow.
Within a column, the status is still shown on each card, so Review PR and Verify Staging sit side by side under Your turn, and you can tell them apart at a glance.
Why a built-in axis
We tried letting the five categories do this job. They could not, because categories describe where an issue is on the timeline, and the timeline no longer tells you who should act. A reviewer agent and a human reviewer are both “in progress” on a timeline; they are opposite turns.
Turn being fixed also keeps the vocabulary shared across every project, every type and every agent. A role note that says “when you are done, hand it back to the person” can mean exactly one thing: move the issue to a status in Your turn.
Next: Issue types explains how a type lists its statuses and which role each agent’s-turn status dispatches.