Agent Workflow Guide

Once installed, your AI agent can track work in Tandem automatically. This page documents the recommended workflow for agents.

The Core Loop

Before starting work — create a task:

create_task(title, project, category, priority, notes)

After completing work — close it:

complete_task(id)

That’s it. Everything else is optional enrichment.

Creating Tasks

Set project and category in a single call — no separate steps needed:

create_task(
  title: "Add rate limiting to auth API",
  project: "My Project",
  category: "Backend",
  priority: "must-do",
  notes: "Use sliding window counter in Redis. Must handle 429 gracefully on the client side."
)

Always include notes for anything non-trivial. Notes carry the context that the title can’t — constraints, acceptance criteria, links to relevant specs. A task without notes is a stub; a task with notes is actionable.

Priority

Value	When to use
`must-do`	Blockers, critical bugs, things that break user-facing flows
`good-to-do`	Features, improvements, most things
`optional`	Nice-to-haves, cleanup, speculative work

Task granularity

Create a task for each meaningful feature, fix, or investigation — anything that maps to a commit or PR, or takes more than ~15 minutes. Don’t create a task per function or file edit.

Linking Tasks

Use link_tasks when tasks have genuine dependencies:

Link type	When to use
`blocks`	`from_task` must be done before `to_task` can start
`before`	`from_task` should happen first but doesn’t strictly block
`relates_to`	Related context, no ordering constraint

link_tasks(from_task_id, to_task_id, link_type)

Chains

A chain is a cluster of tasks connected by dependency links. Tandem computes chains automatically from link_tasks edges — there is no separate “create chain” step. Once two or more tasks are linked, they form a chain and Tandem names it with AI.

create_task(...) → id_a
create_task(...) → id_b
create_task(...) → id_c
link_tasks(id_a, id_b, "blocks")
link_tasks(id_b, id_c, "before")

After these calls, all three tasks form one named chain. The chain graph is visible at telltandem.com/chains. For multi-task sessions, create all tasks first (with notes), then link them.

Plans for Complex Work

For any multi-step feature or investigation you’ve thought through, push a plan to Tandem. When a plan is linked to a task, Tandem auto-generates a summary and subtasks from the plan content.

create_plan(title, content)              → plan_id
create_task(title, project, ...)         → task_id
update_task(task_id, plan_id: plan_id)   → links plan, triggers AI population

After step 3, Tandem populates the task with a concise summary in notes and a set of subtasks derived from the plan’s steps. Push a plan when you’ve written a design doc, spec, or investigation summary with multiple steps. For trivial tasks where the full context fits in notes, skip the plan.

Understanding the User’s Day

Before proposing or starting a batch of work, call get_smart_today to see the user’s AI-generated priorities. This tells you what they consider important and what’s overdue — useful context before suggesting new tasks.

Projects

list_projects returns all active projects with their IDs. You rarely need to call this — just pass the project name to create_task or update_task and Tandem resolves or creates it automatically.

Getting Started

Using Tandem

Organization

Collaboration

CLI

MCP

Settings

Agent Workflow Guide

The Core Loop

Creating Tasks

Categories

Priority

Task granularity

Linking Tasks

Chains

Plans for Complex Work

Understanding the User’s Day

Projects

​The Core Loop

​Creating Tasks

​Categories

​Priority

​Task granularity

​Linking Tasks

​Chains

​Plans for Complex Work

​Understanding the User’s Day

​Projects

The Core Loop

Creating Tasks

Categories

Priority

Task granularity

Linking Tasks

Chains

Plans for Complex Work

Understanding the User’s Day

Projects