traceknot

Work Items

A work item is the GitHub, GitLab, or Jira issue — or a free-text label — a session gets claimed against, so cost rolls up under real work instead of sitting as a flat list of sessions.

Connecting a provider

The picker can search your real issues instead of typing a label by hand, using whichever CLI you already have installed and signed in — there’s no separate traceknot-specific login:

traceknot only reads through these CLIs to fetch an issue’s key and title — it never creates, edits, or comments on anything in GitHub, GitLab, or Jira. A provider tab you haven’t signed into shows as unavailable rather than blocking the picker; the other tabs and Custom still work.

Claiming without a real issue

There’s always a Custom tab in the picker, regardless of which providers you’ve connected. It takes any id and title you type — nothing is checked against GitHub, GitLab, or Jira. Use it for work that doesn’t have a tracked issue yet, or when you’d rather not look one up mid-session.

Making a claim mandatory

By default, a session pauses to ask for a work item but lets you skip — there’s a Skip Context button, and pressing Escape does the same thing.

Turning on Require a work item in Settings & Configuration removes that option entirely: there’s no Skip button and no Escape shortcut. This is a hard block, not just a UI nag — the agent itself is refused and cannot start working on that prompt until something is claimed, so it’s worth turning on only if you actually want every session to stop dead without a work item attached. A Custom entry still satisfies this — “required” means some claim, not specifically a real tracked issue.