Start a workspace from a task

The Inbox’s best trick: Start workspace on a task row launches an agent whose prompt is already seeded with the issue — title, description, and local paths to its downloaded images — as an editable, unsubmitted draft. Optionally, Birch moves the issue to your “in progress” status in its tracker, and again when the PR goes up.

The Start workspace action

Select a task row and press Start workspace in the detail-pane footer (or just Enter — it is the task row’s primary action). The button is enabled for any real task; only the dimmed scaffolding rows (parent tasks not assigned to you) can’t start one.

Birch first resolves which repository the workspace belongs to:

• GitHub, GitLab, and Azure DevOps issues usually match one of your registered clones by their repository URL, and the launch goes straight there.
• Jira, Linear, and YouTrack tasks always show the Choose Repository picker. That is by design, not a failure: these trackers have no git remote, so their repository URL can never match a clone. The picker also appears for a git-host issue whose repository you haven’t cloned yet. If the list is empty it says “No repositories yet — add one first” — add one and retry.

Confirming the picker (or the direct match) opens the normal create-workspace dialog — agent, base branch, model options — with the prompt pre-filled from the task. The workspace itself is a fresh, isolated git worktree on a new branch (see the worktree-first model); your repo’s git-ignored local files travel into it per your .worktreeinclude.

What gets seeded — and how

The issue brief contains the task’s title, its description, and the absolute local paths of its downloaded images, quoted so the agent can open them directly.

The brief is delivered into the agent’s input box as a typed, unsubmitted, editable draft. Nothing is sent until you press Enter in the terminal — so you can trim the description, add constraints, or rewrite the ask entirely before the agent does anything.

Task images

Images referenced by the issue are downloaded during the normal background sync, not at launch time — by the time you press Start workspace they are already cached locally. Downloads are deliberately conservative: only the provider’s own image hosts are fetched (a third-party URL in an issue body is never requested), content is verified by file signature, and per-issue size and count caps apply. The same cached files back the thumbnail strip in the Inbox detail pane and the paths handed to the agent.

Issue status on launch

If the tracker account offers workflow states, launching can move the issue — to “In Progress” or whatever your workflow calls it. The “Update task status?” dialog shows the task, its current status (“Currently: …”), and a Move to dropdown, plus:

• Remember and don’t ask again — “Next time a task from this account reaches this step, it is moved to the chosen status automatically. You can change this in Settings → Tasks.”
• Don’t offer this anymore — a quiet text link that turns the prompt off for this account and step.
• Skip proceeds without changing the status; Change status applies it.

Settings → Tasks holds one row per tracker account and step, each with a mode:

Mode	Behavior
Ask each time	Show the prompt on every launch (default)
Change automatically	Apply the remembered status silently — offered only after a status has been remembered
Never offer	No prompt, no change

Each row shows its remembered status (“Remembered status: …”) and a Reset button. See the Settings reference for the underlying keys.

The full round trip

1. Task — the issue arrives in your Inbox from its tracker.
2. Workspace — Start workspace seeds the brief; on launch, the status prompt can move the issue to your in-progress state.
3. Work — the agent runs in its own worktree; you monitor and review as usual (AI in Birch).
4. PR — Create a pull request from the workspace; the title prefill falls back to the task’s title when the agent session offers none.
5. Status again — PR creation is the second status step, with its own per-account mode in Settings → Tasks (move to “In Review”, for example).

Throughout, the workspace’s properties panel keeps a TASK card naming the source issue, with an action to open the task in the browser — the link back to where the work came from.