Pathrule
Studio workflows

Board settings

Parallel runs, Auto plan, AI activity and the workspace maximum: the four settings that decide how much a board full of agents does without you.


The board has four settings, and each one is a decision about how much a board full of agents is allowed to do without you.

Parallel runs

Off, Run All works one group at a time. On, it runs groups at the same time.

What makes that safer is separation. Before anything starts, Pathrule predicts which files each group of cards will touch. Groups that touch different files run simultaneously, each in its own git worktree. Groups predicted to touch the same files are merged into a single sequential lane, which prevents known collisions from becoming two edits in one checkout.

The prediction is not treated as proof. A board of ten cards is not ten independent jobs, and a plan can miss a file it later needs. Separate worktrees keep a missed prediction isolated as branch work rather than two agents overwriting one folder. Landing still stops on a real merge conflict.

Auto plan

On, every new card gets a detailed plan generated in the background, before you ask for one.

A plan moves through visible states: queued, planning, awaiting reply, ready, or failed. "Awaiting reply" is the honest one. If the planner needs something only you know, it stops and asks rather than guessing and producing a confident plan built on an assumption.

A card with a ready plan starts from a plan instead of a sentence, which is most of the difference between a run that lands and a run that wanders.

The plan is scoped to one card. It has a goal, ordered steps, a test path and risks. Context preparation separately fingerprints the current card revision, resolves target paths and can record a dependency or conflict gap. If the card changes, a stale context receipt is rejected instead of being handed to the run.

AI activity

Pathrule prepares context autonomously. This setting controls one narrower thing: when a bounded model pass is allowed to resolve material ambiguity in that preparation.

  • Low, deterministic. Uses Pathrule and path coverage, with no model calls at all.
  • Medium, balanced. The default. Limited model help, only for material blockers.
  • High, proactive. Resolves more ambiguity on its own, inside the same hard budget.

High is not "spend more". The budget does not move between levels; what moves is how much ambiguity the preparation is allowed to settle before it hands the card to an engine. Usage is shown as it is spent: model passes today, and rolling tokens, both against their limits.

Workspace maximum

An account default sets the level for your workspaces, and a workspace can set its own maximum on top of it.

If your personal choice is above the workspace maximum, your choice is capped rather than overridden silently. The setting shows the level you picked, the effective level you are actually getting, and the fact that a workspace ceiling is what reduced it. A ceiling that lowers your setting without saying so is a setting you cannot trust.

This is what makes a shared board predictable: an organisation can decide how autonomous preparation is allowed to be, and every member sees that decision rather than discovering it.