Project Management
AI-assisted development generates a lot of moving pieces: features being designed, tasks assigned to agents, research findings flowing in, design docs evolving. Without structure, you end up with a sprawl of tickets in one tool, docs in another, and no connection between them.
Sidespace's project management layer ties these together. Projects are the top-level container. Inside each project, themes group features by strategic intent, features track what you are building, tasks track the work, and ideas capture what you might build next. Everything connects back to the project graph that Hoshi and the other agents can read and write.
What's Built
Projects and Lifecycle
A project in Sidespace is a metadata container first and a directory link second. You can create a project before any code exists -- to capture planning, research, and design -- then link it to a directory on disk later. This separation means project state (tasks, features, docs) is never lost if you reorganize your filesystem.
Projects move through lifecycle stages:
| Stage | Meaning |
|---|---|
idea | Concept stage, no active work |
planning | Design and scoping |
building | Active development |
launched | Shipped and live |
maintenance | Stable, occasional updates |
paused | On hold, not archived |
archived | Soft-deleted -- data preserved, reversible |
There are no hard deletes. Archiving a project sets its stage to archived and hides it from active views, but all data is preserved. This is a deliberate design choice: in a system where agents build up context over time, destroying data is rarely the right call.
Themes
Themes are strategic groupings that sit above features. A theme like "Developer Experience" or "Cost Optimization" can span multiple features across different time horizons. Features inherit their visual identity (shape and color) from their parent theme, so the roadmap view has a coherent visual language without manual styling.
The themes accordion in the UI is read-only -- themes are created and managed through Hoshi's theme tools.
Features and the Roadmap
Features are the unit of planned work. Each feature sits on one of four horizons:
| Horizon | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Now | Actively being worked on |
| Next | Committed, starting soon |
| Later | Planned but not yet scheduled |
| Done | Shipped |
The roadmap view renders these as four columns. The Done column intentionally has no "+" button -- features move there by completing their work, not by being created directly.
Feature cards show the full description text (no truncation) with an expandable inline list of linked tasks. Features can also be linked to design documents through a feature_docs join table, so you can trace from a strategic theme down to a specific design doc.
Hoshi has roadmap tools covering CRUD operations plus analytical tools for horizon planning and feature assessment.
Kanban Board
Each project has a kanban view for task-level tracking. Tasks use a ticket_number field (e.g., SID-174) and carry a content JSONB column for structured description data. Tags provide lightweight categorization.
Tasks link to features via a feature_id foreign key. When a task's status changes to cancelled, a database trigger automatically unlinks it from its feature, which chains with an auto_done_feature trigger that checks whether all remaining tasks are complete.
When working on tickets, agents follow a simple workflow: move the task to "doing" status before starting work, then to "done" status when complete. This keeps the kanban accurate and prevents stale ticket buildup.
Ideas Funnel
Not everything is ready to be a feature. The ideas funnel captures speculative items in a ranked leaderboard with drag-to-reorder. Each idea has a drawer view for details, with confirmation dialogs for the two terminal actions: promote (converts to a feature on the roadmap) or delete.
This staging pattern -- capture loosely, promote deliberately -- keeps the roadmap clean while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Project Tabs
Projects open as dismissable tabs in the workspace. Each project tab has child views: Themes, Roadmap, Kanban, Docs, Files, and Whiteboards. All child views receive a projectId prop that scopes their data. The project sidebar (always visible at 220px) provides inline editing for name, organization, description, stage, and directory linking.
Keyboard shortcuts support fast navigation: Cmd+1 for Hub, Cmd+2 through Cmd+9 for open project tabs.
Where It's Heading
Near-term work includes note titles (so notes can be more easily referenced from features) and a design audit to tighten the visual hierarchy across project views. The ideas funnel may gain a background grooming step where Hoshi periodically evaluates and ranks ideas based on project context.