Workspaces and board columns

The loop acts where a local workspace exists, in Claude Desktop or in Orca. A workspace is one of two kinds, told apart by its display name:

Review workspace, named REVIEW <branch> (plugins.github.review_prefix): someone else’s pull request that you review.
Author workspace, any other name: a pull request you develop, whether you opened it or took it over.

Renaming a review workspace in Orca turns it into an author workspace.

Entering and leaving

How	Becomes
your review is requested by name, and the first round runs	review
`wloop review <url>`	review
a workspace linked to your pull request, or on its head branch	author
`wloop take-over <url>`	author; an existing review workspace is renamed to the branch name
`wloop remove <url>`, or Remove in the cockpit	leaves the loop

remove deletes the workspace when its checkout holds nothing that is not on GitHub, and refuses otherwise with the list of what is at stake; --force deletes it with what it holds, for good. Deleting a review workspace by hand only frees its checkout: the pull request stays followed (see workflows). The cockpit’s Done view lists the done tasks whose pull request’s workspace remains; its Remove all clean removes each such workspace that holds nothing not on GitHub, and Approved offers the same for the approved ones. A pull request that merged before any task held it shows in the All view, with its own Remove.

Who moves cards

Only Orca has a board, so cards and columns exist for Orca workspaces alone. A Claude Desktop workspace shows its state in the cockpit, the terminal client and the menu bar.

wloop‘s store is the truth; the board shows it. wloop writes a card’s column, comment and unread mark on every change to the turn and re-asserts them on every fast job. It never reads a column or comment back as state, and the agent never moves a card.

A card you drag outside the columns below is left there (its comment and unread mark still follow) until you move it back or a new round starts.

Review workspace columns

The card follows the newest review turn of the pull request. A nudge never moves it.

Newest review turn	Column
`sent`, `started`	`reviewing` (or `in-review` when the board has no `reviewing` column)
`asked`, `failed`, `unrecorded`	`needs-me`, marked unread, with the comment `asks: <summary>` or `stopped: <summary>`
`done` with an approval	`completed`
`done` with another verdict, `settled`, `dismissed`	`reviewed`

The pull request merged or closed moves the card to completed. An approved card of an open pull request stays followed: new commits or a re-request bring it back to reviewing.

Author workspace columns

Local	GitHub	Column
the agent is working	any	`in-progress`
the agent stopped with the head pushed	pending	`in-review`
in sync	approved, checks green or absent, not a draft	`ready-to-merge`
any	changes requested on the current head	`in-progress`, marked unread
unpushed commits, card in `ready-to-merge`	any	`in-progress`
the newest address turn is `asked`, `failed` or `unrecorded`	any	`needs-me`, marked unread
	merged or closed	`completed`

“Approved” also covers repositories without required reviews where someone approved; “green” also covers repositories without checks.

Column names

views.orca.columns maps each state to a column of your board. A state left out keeps its default:

[views.orca.columns]
working = "reviewing"
working-fallback = "in-review"
needs-me = "needs-me"
reviewed = "reviewed"
ready = "ready-to-merge"

Orca has no read-only way to list a board’s columns, so a missing column shows up only when a write fails; the daemon’s log names it when a turn starts.

Orca’s own status hooks (orca-workspace-status.sh, in Claude Code’s settings) move cards to in-progress on every prompt. doctor reports them as competing with wloop‘s writes. With the in-review fallback column they move review cards too.