How lerp works

The board is your Linear team’s statuses and the tickets sitting in them. It is the only thing lerp reads and writes, and lerp’s screen is a view of it.

Ticket

A Linear issue. Linear holds every durable fact, and lerp keeps no store of its own. Local disk holds config, credentials, run evidence and telemetry, never truth.

Queue

A Linear status with instructions attached. A ticket sitting in status runs through runner with prompt, then moves to on_success, or to on_failure when the agent exits non-zero. Configuration has the fields.

Those four fields are the whole workflow language. No conditionals, no templates, no DAG. The topology is where each on_success points, and branching is a person or an agent moving a ticket.

Runner

An adapter to a coding-agent CLI, one of Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, or a raw command. It takes a prompt and a working directory, runs to exit, and its exit code means done or failed.

Lane

The concurrency unit. At most N agents run at once, one per lane, and N defaults to 10. A lane is a disposable workspace that provision builds and dispose tears down.

The loop

A reconciler. Each pass compares the board against the agents running on this machine and closes the gap. A ticket sitting in a queue’s status with nothing running on it gets an agent, if a lane is free. A finished run gets its ticket moved. An agent an earlier lerp started gets adopted. So a crash is drift rather than an error, and the next lerp picks up what the last one left.

The claim

Lerp claims a ticket by assigning it to your Linear user. A ticket is eligible when it sits in a queue’s status, has no assignee, and is not blocked by an unfinished ticket. A claimed ticket is somebody else’s work, even when the somebody is you, which is how several developers share a board with no server between them.

Where a run comes to rest

A finished run releases the claim wherever the ticket rests. Rest in a status some queue serves, and the next pass runs that stage. Rest in a status no queue serves, and the pipeline is waiting on a human. That is a gate. Promote it, or move it in Linear.

Two exceptions. A ticket moved out of the queue’s status mid-run keeps that move, and the skipped hop is reported. A ticket assigned to someone else by the end of the run is theirs, hop and claim both.