Tickets: A Work List Joined to What Your Sessions Actually Did
A work list and the work usually live apart, and you keep them in sync by memory. Arbiter's Tickets tab books time, tokens, cost, edited files and commits to a ticket only when it can prove which session did the work, and estimates come from your own closed tickets, never invented.
Run a handful of agents for a week and you end up with two records of the same work. One is the list of what you meant to do: an issue tracker, a notes file, a text file of next steps. The other is what actually happened: sessions, transcripts, commits. The first is tidy and wrong by Thursday. The second is accurate and impossible to read. Keeping them in step is a chore you do in your head, and it is the first chore to slip when the fleet gets busy.
Arbiter now keeps both in one place. Tickets is a work list joined to what your sessions provably did.
A ticket in two clicks
Pick a project and a type, and type into one box whose first line becomes the title. There are seven types (feature, bug, refactor, investigate, release, docs and chore), each with a short template, and five states: queued, active, blocked with a reason, done and dropped. An optional size guess from S to XL is there if you want it. Each project gets its own keys, like AUD-042, so a ticket has a name you can say out loud. Mistakes get Undo instead of an “are you sure” dialog.
A plan an agent wrote without a ticket is offered as one in a click, titled from the plan’s first heading.
Evidence only from proven joins
A ticket is only as useful as the work attached to it, so Arbiter books work to a ticket only when it can prove the connection: a session started from the ticket, a session you renamed with the ticket’s key, a session you linked with a click, or a suggestion you accepted for a session working on the ticket’s plan. Nothing is attached because it looked related.
Once a session is joined, the ticket shows what it cost: wall time and agent time, tokens by kind with the agents’ share included, list-price cost (a floor when a model has no published price), the files edited, and the commits the session itself made.
Those token totals had to be right first. The same pass found that session token counts were 2.2 to 2.9 times too high, because a transcript repeats a reply’s usage on every line it writes for that reply. Usage is now counted once per reply, and on our own transcripts the totals match an independent recount exactly.
Estimates from your history, never invented
When a ticket goes active, Arbiter estimates it from your own record: the median and the 80th percentile of eight or more comparable closed tickets, frozen at that moment so the estimate cannot drift to match the result. Without enough history there is no estimate, rather than a made-up one. A History view puts actuals beside estimates and size guesses, so you can see how good your own guesses are.
From wherever you are
Tickets work from the desktop app, from the command line with arbiter ticket, and from your phone
with /tickets and /ticket, where a new ticket keeps everything you typed: the first line as the
title and the rest as its body. Starting a session from a ticket on the phone asks you to confirm,
or needs a 2FA code where 2FA is required. Blocked tickets show up in the brief.
A project can be bound to its GitHub repository. Syncing, when you ask for it, reads GitHub only: open issues become tickets, linked issues keep their state and title current, and pull requests that name a ticket’s key are linked to it.
Your agents and your tools can use it too
The Claude Code sessions Arbiter launches can reach its tickets over MCP: an agent can note progress, lay out a ticket’s work as ordered phases, and say when it is done. TheAuditor, Warden and Curator can read and write tickets the same way, and an opt-in setting leaves a short outcome note in the project’s Curator memory when a ticket is done. The work list stops being something you update for your agents and becomes something they update with you.
Tickets builds on the fleet view, and starting work from the phone goes through the same gate as everything else in Nothing on Your Machine Can Stand In for Your Second Factor.
Arbiter is a proprietary working alpha in public binary release preparation. Follow the public release channel or RSS feed for updates.
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