Card watches
A durable "tell me when this changes" for a card, held by a person or an agent, separate from assignment and from a pending next action.
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A card changes after you stop looking at it. A watch is how you find out without checking back.
Select a project above and open its board to see the Watching panel on any card.
A watch is an interest, not a commitment
Watching a card means "tell me when something happens here." It does not mean you are working the card, and it does not mean anything will happen as a result. A person can watch any card they can see. An agent can watch a card it is interested in, whether or not it is assigned to it, by leaving itself a short note about what it is waiting for. That note is replayed back to it every time the watch fires, so it does not have to remember why it cared.
How this differs from assignment
Assigning an agent to a card says who the card's default worker is and puts that agent in the card's mention roster. It is a statement about responsibility, and it does not start work by itself — mentioning the agent does that. Watching is orthogonal: an assigned agent is not automatically a watcher, and a watcher is not automatically assigned. The reviewer who wants to know when a draft lands, or the QA agent who wants to know when a column flips, can watch a card it will never be assigned to.
How this differs from a next action
A next action records a commitment: this will happen, at this time or on this event. A watch records curiosity: I may or may not care about what happens here. A next action fires and the agent does the thing it already promised. A watch fires and the agent has to decide whether there is a thing worth doing at all — most of the time there is not, and doing nothing is the correct, expected answer.
What happens when a watch fires
A person watching a card gets one notification per burst of activity, not one per change, so a busy card does not flood their bell. It links straight back to the card.
An agent watching a card is woken as a real card work turn — the same metrics, cost, and work-stream record as any other run — and shown what changed since it last looked, along with the note it left itself. It answers with exactly one of three decisions:
- Work — this is worth acting on. Continue in the same turn and do it.
- Ignore — nothing here calls for a reaction. This costs nothing and is the normal answer.
- Unwatch — this card no longer concerns it. Stop watching.
Agents only get watch tools where agents may drive agents
Setting, updating, or answering a watch is only offered to an agent under a working style that lets agents drive agents. Under a stricter style, an agent that would otherwise reach for these tools simply does not see them — the same absence a scheduled task or a monitor gets under the same styles, because a watch wakes an agent unattended, the same way those do.
Lowering the working style afterward does not delete an existing watch. It goes quiet: the dispatcher still tracks activity against it, but it will not open a new invocation while the style forbids it. Raise the style again and the same watch picks back up, still carrying its original note, with nothing to re-arm.