How Laimonade works
The model Laimonade works on — roadmap hierarchy, calendar-week sprints, the four Kanban columns, what makes a backlog item agent-executable, and how commits become evidence.
Last reviewed · maintained by Founder
The model, before the mechanics
Laimonade has one shape and everything else follows from it: work is arranged milestone → epic → item, and it moves through a weekly sprint one column at a time. Read this page before the reference sections. The tool list is unusable if you do not know what a Ready column is or why an item needs acceptance criteria.
How is work organised?
Four levels, from the year down to the thing an agent does this afternoon:
| Level | What it is | Who usually writes it |
|---|---|---|
| Milestone | An outcome with a target date — what the business can do once it lands | You, with Laimon |
| Epic | A body of work under a milestone, holding related items | Laimon, from your intent |
| Item | One story, bug or improvement — the unit an agent executes | Laimon, refined by you |
| Sprint | One calendar week's selection of items | Laimon proposes, you decide |
Milestones and epics exist so that finishing an item moves something visible. An item with no epic still gets built, but it contributes to no milestone and appears in no progress figure — which is why Laimonade keeps trying to parent things.
How long is a sprint?
A sprint is one calendar week, Monday to Sunday, created automatically. There is no sprint planning ceremony to run and no sprint to open or close by hand.
On Monday, in your project's timezone, the previous week's sprint closes and three things happen:
- Items still unfinished carry forward into the new week, keeping their column.
- Items that reached Done are archived with their completion date, so the Kanban shows this week's work rather than an accumulating pile.
- The closed sprint keeps its delivered points, which is what velocity is computed from.
Archived is not a graveyard: an archived item that carries a completion date still counts towards its epic and milestone, and still appears in the archive list. That is why completion dates matter more here than statuses do.
What are the Kanban columns?
Four, and the boundaries between them are the only workflow Laimonade insists on:
- Backlog — everything not in this week's sprint. Ordered by hand, grouped under epics.
- Ready / Active — on the sprint and available to pull. This is the column a connected coding agent reads. An item arriving here should need no further questions.
- In Review — the work is claimed to be done and is waiting for a human verdict. Agents can put items here. They cannot take them further.
- Done — a person accepted it. Ordered newest-completed-first, so the column answers "what did we just finish".
What makes a backlog item agent-executable?
An item is agent-executable when an agent can act on it without asking you anything. In practice that means four things are present:
- Acceptance criteria that can be checked, not restated intent. "Users can log in" is intent; "an expired session returns 401 and the client redirects to /login once, without a loop" is a criterion.
- The blast radius: which repos and paths the change touches, and what must not break there. Laimonade keeps a registry of regression invariants per area and serves them with the item.
- Dependencies, so an item that needs another one first says so rather than being discovered halfway.
- A single change. One item, one thing. An item holding six deliverables cannot be reviewed, and an agent will do the first two and report success.
You do not have to write any of that yourself. Describing the problem in chat is enough to start; Laimon drafts the item and asks about the parts that are missing.
How does work reach an agent?
Over MCP. A connected coding agent asks for the Ready column, gets a numbered menu, loads the items it wants in full, and reads the regression notes and your project rules before it edits anything. When it is finished it submits the item for review, which asserts the acceptance criteria are met — which is why loading the item first, rather than working from its title, is the part that matters.
See connect your coding agent for setup, and the MCP tool reference for exactly what an agent can and cannot do.
How does an item get closed?
Three paths, and a coding agent's claim about its own work is never one of them:
A person accepts it. Someone reads the item in In Review, checks it against its criteria, and moves it to Done.
Laimon closes it. When you ask it to, or once the work is finished and nothing is left for a person to check, Laimon — the product owner agent — can move an item to Done itself. Whenever a person still has to look, it moves the item to In Review instead. A closure Laimon makes is marked as Laimon's, separately from any approval, so the Kanban always shows who closed what.
An agent hands it back. A connected coding agent moves its own item to In Review over MCP and records what it ran — the commands, their results, and the steps a person still needs to take. That attestation is what you are reading when you accept or reject the work:
Commits move the Kanban on their own. Once a repository is tracked, Laimonade reads every commit pushed to it and looks for the item it implements:
- A confident match (80% or better) moves the item from Backlog or Ready to In Review, on the sprint the commit landed in, with the commit attached as evidence. That happens whether or not the item belongs to an epic yet; moving it on to Done asks for an epic with a milestone first.
- A weaker match (70–79%) is recorded on the item as a possible match. The item does not move.
- A commit that matches nothing becomes a new backlog item drafted from it, in In
Review on that sprint, so work done outside the backlog still shows up. Merges, version
bumps, and
chore,docs,style,ciandbuildcommits are skipped.
None of this moves anything to Done: a commit takes work as far as review, and closing it is one of the three paths above. You can also ask Laimon to attach a specific commit to an item.
Epics are never matched to commits. They complete when their children do.
What consumes credits?
Credits are consumed when Laimon does token-backed work for you: grooming an item, planning a sprint, writing a work order, producing a digest. Credits are metered from AI token usage only, so reading the Kanban, moving a card and inviting a colleague cost nothing.
Credits reset monthly and do not roll over. If a plan runs out, Laimon stops taking new token-backed work rather than billing you for more. See pricing for what each plan includes.
Where to go next
Getting started walks the whole path from signup to a sprint with Ready work in it.