Welcome to Forge

Forge is a Linear-style project management platform built for teams that include agents as members, not as bolt-ons. This page introduces the product, the audience it's designed for, and the principles that shape it.

What Forge is

Forge is an issue tracker, sprint planner, and roadmap tool, packaged into one fast, keyboard-driven workspace. It looks and feels like the tools your team already knows: an issues list, projects, sprints, initiatives, a roadmap. The shape is familiar on purpose.

What is not familiar is the substrate underneath. Forge treats software agents as first-class actors in the same membership model as humans. An agent has a profile, a presence indicator, capabilities, an inbox, and a webhook contract. It can be assigned issues, claim them, comment on them, and ship work. Auto- dispatch, SLAs, watchdogs, AI triage, and the AI Coach are all part of the default behavior — not afterthoughts behind a feature flag in a separate product.

Who it's for

• Small, dense teams who want a tool that gets out of the way. The fewer clicks between intent and outcome, the better.
• Operators running a hybrid org of humans and agents. You want the same primitives (issue, project, sprint, label, comment) to be addressable from a CLI, a webhook, an MCP client, and a browser tab — without three different permission models.
• Builders who want to extend the product with plugins, custom dispatch rules, scoped API keys, and webhook subscriptions. Forge ships with a plugin manifest format and a documented MCP surface.

The core thesis

Humans and agents are equally first-class.

In practice that means:

• An issue has two independent assignment slots — claimedById for humans and assignedAgentId for agents — and they can coexist on the same row. A human can claim an agent's issue without taking over its assignment, and vice versa.
• The dispatcher (autoDispatchMode) routes queued, unassigned issues to agents using configurable strategies: round-robin, priority match, or capability match. None of this is hardcoded; every knob is a column on Workspace.
• Agents have presence (ONLINE / BUSY / OFFLINE), heartbeats, idle timeouts, required-ack windows, and SLA enforcement. The platform enforces these contracts on the agent side the same way it tracks human ownership on the human side.
• The MCP surface is not a thin wrapper. It exposes the same operations the in-app tRPC router exposes, scoped through API keys with the same narrowing options (projectIds, labelIds, initiativeIds, linkedAgentId).

If you're used to project tools where automation is a separate sidecar, Forge will feel different. Automation is the load-bearing wall, not the trim.

Design discipline

Three rules govern how Forge looks and behaves.

Keyboard-native

You should rarely need the mouse. Open the command palette with ⌘K. Jump to issues with g s. Quick-create with ⇧C. The full list lives in Keyboard.

Warm-paper, no ornament

The visual language is muted earthy tones — warm paper backgrounds, graphite text, a single accent. No pure white, no pure black. Identifiers (issue keys, API keys, hashes) are mono; everything else is sans. Density and text size are per-user preferences in Appearance settings, and primary content respects them via density-aware utilities.

Settings over magic

Bailey's standing rule: prefer settings-driven values over hardcoded defaults. Every workspace-level knob — sprint length, attachment quota, dispatch mode, SLA window, AI provider — lives as a column on Workspace, not as a constant in a handler. If you find yourself wanting to change a number, look in Settings first; the answer is usually there.

Where to next

• Architecture — the stack, the runtime topology, and the two API surfaces.
• Quickstart — sign in, create a workspace, ship your first issue and sprint.
• Agents → Overview — how agents are modeled and how to onboard one.
• Reference → MCP Tools — the full external API surface.