Issues Overview | Elixion Docs

An issue is the unit of work in Elixion, the platform for Engineering Intelligence™. Every story, task, bug, epic and spike is an issue, and so is every piece of work you hand to an AI agent. This page covers what an issue holds and where you see it.

The issue key

Each issue gets a key made from its project key and a number, for example PAY-42. The key is how the issue is addressed everywhere: in the list, in search, in a branch name, in a pull request title, and in a Claude conversation through the connector. An issue keeps its key for its lifetime.

Statuses

Elixion has seven issue statuses:

| Status | What it means | |--------|---------------| | Backlog | Not picked up yet | | To Do | Committed, not started | | In Progress | Someone or something is working on it | | In Review | Waiting on review or acceptance | | Testing | Being verified | | Done | Finished | | Deferred | Parked for later |

These seven are the whole set. There are no per project status values and no custom statuses.

What is configurable is the board. In Project Settings under the Board tab you decide which column each status appears in, what that column is called, and whether it carries a work in progress limit. Every status is either on exactly one column or listed under Not shown on board, so no work falls off the board without you choosing that. Deferred starts under Not shown on board, which is why deferred work is parked off the board until you move Deferred onto a column; its issues still show in List view and search.

A merged pull request moves each issue it names to In Review and assigns it back to its reporter for acceptance. See GitHub.

Blocked

Blocking is not a status. An issue carries a blocked flag and a reason, set when you add a blocked by link to it, and cleared when the issue reaches Done. The reason can also come from the platform, for example when a run could not reach the connected repository. See Dependencies.

Priorities

Critical, High, Medium, Low and Trivial. Medium is the default.

Types

Epic, Story, Task, Bug, Subtask, Spike and Tech Debt. The create form offers Task, Story, Bug, Epic, Spike and Tech Debt. A project can also define its own types with their own icon, colour and hierarchy rules. See Issue Types.

What an issue holds

Core

Title and description. The description is rich text: formatting, images and file attachments, and @ mentions.
Acceptance criteria, as its own field rather than a convention inside the description.
Definition of done.
Type, status, priority.
Reporter, who is fixed after creation, and an assignee.

Assignee

An issue can be assigned to a person or to an AI agent. These are two separate fields on the issue, so an agent assignment is recorded as an agent assignment and not as a person. What happens when you assign an agent depends on that agent's autonomy level. See Using Agents.

Planning

Story points, entered with the estimation scale the project is configured for.
Original estimate, remaining estimate and time spent, all in hours.
Due date, and start and target dates for planning an epic on the roadmap.
Sprint, for projects that run sprints.
Epic, and a parent issue for subtasks.

Classification

Labels, free text and lower cased.
Components, which are per project records you create yourself. Nothing is seeded.
Environment and resolution, both free text.

Delivery

A branch name and a pull request URL.
An evidence trail: pull requests, commits, test runs, artifacts and links, with the state each reached. A connected repository populates it as work lands.

Relationships

Issues link to each other with Blocks, Blocked by, Relates to, Duplicates, Duplicated by, Clones, Cloned by, Causes and Caused by. Hierarchy is separate: it is carried by the issue's own parent and epic fields, not by a link. See Dependencies.

Where issues appear

Board. The Kanban board at Board in the sidebar, one column per configured column, drag and drop between them. A column header shows its count, and its limit when one is set.

List. The issue list at List in the sidebar, with columns ID, Title, Status, Priority, Assignee, Reporter, Pts and Updated. It filters by title or ID, and has separate Archived and Deferred views.

Detail. One issue in full: description, acceptance criteria, attachments, activity and comments, a properties panel (Status, Assignee, Reporter, Type, Priority, Estimate, Sprint, Epic, Labels, Branch, Created, Updated), linked work, relationships, subtasks, and a result card when the work has produced a preview.

Search. Press Cmd+K or Ctrl+K anywhere. An exact issue key ranks above everything else.

The result card

An issue that has produced a preview shows a result card above its Delivery lists: what was built, where to open it, and how big the change was.

The card appears when a deployment reports against a branch that names the issue, which needs a connected repository whose deployment provider reports GitHub Deployments and whose webhook is subscribed to the deployment_status event. It also appears when an agent records a preview itself, which needs no connected repository at all.

It reads Building while the deployment is running, Ready with a link when it succeeds, and Failed when it does not. A preview that has been retired keeps its link and shows when it stopped being live, because a retired preview was still a real one. One card is kept per environment, so redeploying to the same environment updates it rather than adding another.

Alongside the link it shows the size of the change taken from the pull request: files changed, lines added, lines removed, and the time those numbers were read. Elixion shows the latest preview it was told about, with the time it recorded it, rather than polling the provider.

Comments and activity

Comments are rich text and support @ mentions. Agents comment too, so an agent's progress on an issue reads in the same thread as a colleague's. Mentioning someone notifies them once, even if they are also the assignee or the reporter.

The activity trail records field changes, status transitions, link additions and removals, and sprint carry over.

Archiving

A Done or Deferred issue can be archived. Archiving is a soft action: nothing is deleted, the issue drops off the board and the default list, and it appears under the Archived view. A Done issue is archived with a reason of Completed, Won't do or Duplicate; a Deferred issue with Won't do or Duplicate. Epics archive at any status and need no reason. Restoring reverses it.