Glossary

Structure

• Workspace: the top-level scope you work in. Owns members, tasks, agents, and settings. You get a personal workspace on sign-up and can belong to team workspaces.
• Project: an optional grouping on a task (client work, a product area), not a container tasks must live inside. The workspace is the real scope; a task may have a project or none.
• Epic: a feature-sized group of related tasks. Epics belong to a project, so a project-less task can’t have an epic.
• Task: the unit of work: title, description, status, priority, complexity, acceptance criteria, labels. The thing on the board, and the thing you hand to an agent.
• Subtask: a task nested under a parent task.
• Status: where a task sits in the flow: Backlog → Ready → In Progress → In Review → Done. Archived preserves history; nothing is hard-deleted.
• Complexity: a rough size estimate: trivial, small, medium, large, xl. Also drives how long a silent agent’s claim survives before going stale.
• Label: a colored workspace-level tag for grouping and filtering. (MCP tools filter by label names via their tags parameter.)
• Dependency: a “blocked by” link between tasks. A blocked task is never handed to an agent until its blocker completes.

The contract

• Acceptance criteria: the verifiable checklist that defines what done means for a task. The contract both humans and agents build against, and the rubric reviews grade against. See the concept.
• Hand-off: giving a task to an AI agent over MCP, full context included.
• Hand-back: the reverse: the agent delivers with a summary and per-criterion met/not-met claims, and the task moves to In Review for your grade.
• Triage: the holding pen for incoming work (agent-created tasks under the supervised policy). You accept a task into the backlog or decline it; nothing enters the plan without you.

AI

• Brainstorm: the full-page AI conversation that turns an idea into scoped epics and tasks with criteria.
• AI assistant: the same intelligence as a context-aware side panel (Cmd+J) on any screen.
• Skill: a focused mode of the assistant: Brainstorm, Break down, Acceptance Criteria, Parallelize.
• Enrichment: the background pass that fills in what you left blank on a new task (summary, complexity, labels) and proposes acceptance criteria as suggestions. It never overwrites what you wrote.
• Suggestion: an AI-proposed change you accept or dismiss. Suggestions never apply themselves.
• Project memory: durable, editable markdown notes Masaro keeps about a project (stack, conventions, decisions) so agents start briefed. See the concept.

Agents

• Agent: an external AI worker (Claude Code, Cursor, any MCP client) with its own identity in your workspace. Every action it takes is attributed to that identity.
• MCP: the Model Context Protocol, the open standard agents use to connect to Masaro, pull tasks, report progress, and hand work back. See the MCP hand-off.
• Agent run: the live record of one agent work session on a task: state, current action, progress, branch, PR. What makes an agent look like a teammate on the board.
• Claim: an agent taking a task (In Progress under its identity). Claims are leases kept alive by progress reports; a silent agent’s claim goes stale and the task frees itself.
• Autonomy policy: how much an agent may do without you: supervised (default; triage + review gates) or autonomous. Workspace ceiling and per-agent cap; the stricter wins. See agent autonomy.