# Board Taxonomy > How 33GOD models ticket state on a Plane board — which facts belong in a state, which in a label, and which axis a new label joins. Use when adding or renaming a Plane label, deciding between a label and a state, wiring automation that writes to a board, scaffolding a new project board, or reconciling boards that have drifted apart. - Skill: `delorenj/board-taxonomy` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 2 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add delorenj/board-taxonomy` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/delorenj/board-taxonomy/raw - Safety review: pending (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS) - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: delorenj (https://skillmd.com/u/delorenj) - Updated: 2026-09-10 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/delorenj/board-taxonomy --- # 33GOD Board Taxonomy A Plane board carries several different kinds of fact, and Plane offers only two carriers for them: **states** and **labels**. Left alone, everything becomes a label. Measured across the 25 fleet-bound boards on 2026-09-04: **75 distinct label names, 72 of them on exactly one board**, and `bug` in three different colours. See [references/field-survey.md](references/field-survey.md). That happened because nothing was wrong with any single decision. Labels are authored *at runtime* by whichever agent needs one first — the grooming prompt says "add `lifecycle:triaged`", the agent finds it missing, and the `label` MCP tool creates it. Same prompt, same model, different name every time. The fix is not discipline; it is a declared, closed set. ## The one test Do not classify a label by what it means. Classify it by **who writes it and what clears it.** That single question resolves every case below. | kind | cleared by | carrier | exclusive | |---|---|---|---| | **Position** — where it is in the pipeline | a human or agent moving it | Plane **state** | yes, structurally | | **Latch** — automation recorded a fact | the next pipeline stage | `lifecycle:` label | one per axis | | **Lease** — a process is holding it right now | the holder, or a sweeper | `agent:` label | one per axis | | **Facet** — a durable property of the ticket | someone deciding it is false | `xp:`, `risk:`, `needs:`, bare words | no | ### Latch vs lease — the distinction that matters Ask: **if the process holding this dies, does the label become a lie?** - `agent:working` — yes. It is a **lease**, not a state. It must self-clear, and it must be safe to force-clear, because the thing it describes is a running turn that can vanish. - `lifecycle:triaged` — no. Grooming really did finish; that stays true forever. It is a **latch**. This is operational, not cosmetic. Leases need a TTL and a sweeper. Latches need neither. Getting it wrong leaves permanent lies on the board. ## The axes Closed set. Anything with a colon must appear here. | axis | kind | writer | values | |---|---|---|---| | `lifecycle:` | latch, exclusive | automation only | `triaged`, `needs-input`, `blocked` | | `agent:` | lease, exclusive | automation only | `working`, `failed` | | `xp:` | facet, exclusive | either | `internal`, `external` | | `risk:` / `needs:` | facet, multi | either | open within the axis | Everything else is a **bare word**, descriptive, per-project, and nobody's business but that board's: `bug`, `docs`, `spike`, `security`. ## Rules 1. **Position never goes in a label.** You have a 9-state machine; use it. A label that answers "where is this in the pipeline" is a bug. This is what rules out `phase:0/1/2`, `scope:proposed`, `blocked-by:M0`. 2. **One writer per exclusive axis.** Plane cannot enforce exclusivity — GitLab has scoped labels (`key::value` replaces within `key`), Plane has nothing — so the writer enforces it. Corollary: **if a human has to hand-set it, it belongs in the state machine instead.** 3. **A colon means machine-readable and closed.** Bare words are descriptive and open. This is checkable: any colon label not in the table above is either a mistake or an axis someone forgot to declare. 4. **Colour encodes the axis, not the value** — one family per axis, one shade per value within it. Not hypothetical tidiness: by the time the set was closed, `lifecycle:triaged` had already reached two colours (teal on JIMB, amber on 33GOD), exactly the way `bug` reached three. 5. **Cap the functional set at ~8.** The cost was never filtering — 75 labels filter fine. It is that every agent re-invents a name it cannot look up. Eight is memorizable. Descriptive labels can grow freely per project. ## Where this is declared A standards document rots exactly the way those 75 labels did. The taxonomy is real only where it is (a) in a file the agent already reads and (b) provisioned by a tool. Both seams exist: - **Declaration** — `.project.json`, `activity_report.board.exposure_labels`. Already on `groomingPrompt`'s read path. Today only `james-brennan` declares it, and only for the `xp:` axis. - **Provision** — `bloodbank/bin/bb-board-scaffold`, `FUNCTIONAL_LABELS`. Keep those two in agreement. When they disagree, the declaration wins and the scaffolder is wrong. ## Scaffolding a new board Plane exposes **no template API** on this instance — `/templates/`, `/project-templates/` and `/workitem-templates/` all 404 — and **no issue types** (404), which is why classification has to be labels at all. States *are* fully writable over v1. ```bash bb-board-scaffold # dry run over every fleet board bb-board-scaffold --to DELO,DNET --apply bb-board-scaffold --from JIMB --all --apply ``` It clones the reference board's state machine and provisions the functional labels. **States** it only adds and aligns: - never deletes a state, and never reorders one it did not create; - never touches `default` or `is_triage` — a board must have exactly one default state, and moving it silently re-homes every new ticket; - refuses a board reporting zero states, which is the signature of a soft-deleted project, not an empty one. **Labels** it adds, and **recolours where they have drifted**. Colour is cosmetic — unlike a state's group it can be corrected without moving anything — so this is what actually keeps one name to one colour across 25 boards. Any colon label outside the closed set is reported as `? undeclared colon labels` and never touched: deleting a label strips it from every ticket carrying it, and that does not come back. 33GOD and JIMB hold byte-identical 9-state machines and either is a sound reference. Note that `--all` excludes the reference board itself, so its own labels go unreconciled; follow with `bb-board-scaffold --to --apply`. ## The ack chip, as a worked example `agent:working` exists because a ticket sat visibly untouched for the entire time its agent was booting — 377s, 633s and 2596s measured on three JIMB tickets. No instruction in an agent's prompt can close that gap, because the gap *is* the agent starting up. The acknowledgement has to come from the lane, at dispatch. Both ticket lanes stamp the chip the moment the Fleet node reports `invoked: true`, and clear it when that agent's turn ends. Two constraints shaped it, and both generalise to anything that writes labels: - **Plane has no per-issue label sub-resource.** Every label write is a full replacement of the array, so a writer must re-read the issue first. Trusting the webhook payload instead is how you silently delete the agent's own `lifecycle:triaged`. - **A `bloodbank.agent.invocation.*` event carries no board and no ticket** — only a correlation id, and that id is *inherited*, not the recomputable ticket uuid. So the dispatch side records `correlationid -> ticket` and the turn-end side spends it. Store and spend; never try to invert. Measured: chip on in 339ms of node time, off 271s later, leaving the three labels the agent had added itself untouched. ## Known gaps - **The lease has no board-side sweeper.** The chip's expiry lives in n8n workflow static data, so if n8n restarts mid-turn a chip can strand with nothing to clear it. A `--sweep` on `bb-ack-labels` is the fix. - **`.project.json` declares only the `xp:` axis, in one repo.** The other three axes are baked into the scaffolder instead of declared. - **`groomingPrompt` still says "using the label names the board already uses"** — which, on a board with no labels, tells the agent to invent. It should read the declared axes. - **CANDY and CANDYS accept nothing** — zero states, and a label create 409s as a duplicate while GET reports count 0. They are soft-deleted, not empty. - **Thirteen undeclared colon labels are still live**, reported by the scaffolder's lint and left alone because deleting one strips it from its tickets. JIMB carries `phase:0/1/2`, `scope:proposed|gated|exploratory| completed`, `sprint:shadow-foundation`, `violation:quiet|amber-attention`; DECK carries `blocked-by:M0`, `needs:hardware`, `risk:unverified`; INFR carries `project:DeLoContainers`, `stack:media`. `phase:`, `scope:` and `blocked-by:` are Rule 1 violations — position wearing a label — and want migrating into the state machine. `needs:` and `risk:` are declared open axes and are fine. The rest are undeclared axes someone should either declare or demote to bare words.