Manage project work and materials

The Projects page brings together work items, artifacts, Skills, working agreements, and project sessions for a registered project. A project still has a real root directory, but NextClaw stores work-item data separately. You do not need to add markers, configuration files, or a tracking Skill to the project directory.

Open a project home

Create a project or add an existing directory from the Chat sidebar, then select the project name. The page keeps the existing Artifacts, Skills, Working agreement, and project-session capabilities while adding a work summary, list, and board.

Overview requests only the work summary and recent items. It does not scan project files or replay session history to calculate statistics. Artifacts, Skills, and the working agreement load on demand in their own views.

Create and advance work items

Create an item from Work items. A project receives these general-purpose states on first use: Backlog, Planned, In Progress, In Review, Awaiting Acceptance, Completed, and Canceled.

You can rename and reorder states or add project-specific ones. Each state maps to one stable lifecycle category: backlog, unstarted, started, completed, or canceled. This keeps summary counts consistent while letting each project customize its workflow. When deleting a state that still has items, select a migration destination first.

State changes append to an immutable activity timeline instead of replacing history. For example, moving from In Progress to In Review, back for changes, and into review again remains visible as three separate transitions.

Every work item shown in Overview, the list, or the board is clickable. All of them open the same right-side detail drawer instead of appending a flat detail panel to the page. In the drawer you can:

• edit the title, description, state, and attention flag;
• inspect the complete activity timeline;
• soft-delete or restore the item;
• link or unlink artifact files inside the project and open linked files directly.

How AI uses work items

Project Work tools are available only to sessions that belong to a project. AI can list, inspect, create, and update work items and manage artifact links. Sessions without a project do not receive these tools.

A work item represents a user intention or deliverable worth tracking over time. Temporary execution steps and run plans are outside this feature; Project Work does not replace a run plan.

Committed changes publish real-time notifications so the page can refetch current data. Events mean only that something changed. They are not the database, and consumers do not replay event history.

Data and project-directory boundaries

NextClaw stores work items, states, activity history, and artifact links in its own data directory. The project root remains the identity and file boundary, but work tracking never requires a dedicated file inside it.

An artifact link must point to an existing file under the project root. The database stores a project-relative path rather than a machine-specific absolute path.

Manage work from the CLI

Unlike a project-bound session, the CLI cannot infer a current project from conversation context. Every Project Work command therefore requires a project ID:

nextclaw projects work list --project <project-id>
nextclaw projects work create "Improve the project page" --project <project-id>
nextclaw projects work update <work-item-id> --project <project-id> --state <state-id>
nextclaw projects work activity <work-item-id> --project <project-id>

The CLI calls the running local NextClaw service and reuses the same Kernel write contract. If the service is not running, it fails directly instead of starting a second writer. See the command reference for the complete command set.

Existing project observation

Artifacts, Skills, working agreements, and the legacy read-only observation remain available. Existing .nextclaw/project.yaml files, project rules, project Skills, and historical markers continue to work; they are simply no longer prerequisites for creating, counting, or advancing work items.

You can still read the legacy observation snapshot with:

nextclaw projects observe /absolute/path/to/project --json