- All playbooks
- Give every open ticket its own agent
Give every open ticket its own agent
Turn the issue board into the queue for parallel agent runs.
Company examples
How OpenAI used this technique
Read what OpenAI changed and follow the original sources.
Give every open ticket its own agent
Translated to GitHub Actions
- What OpenAI built
- OpenAI's Symphony turns a project-management board into a control plane where every open task gets an agent.
- Your GitHub Actions version
- An agent for every open ticket, with dependent tasks started only when they are unblocked.
Symphony turns a project-management board such as Linear into a control plane for coding agents. Every open task gets an agent, agents run continuously, and humans review the results. A planning task can generate a tree of dependent tasks, and agents start only the tasks that are not blocked, so independent work runs in parallel. Before Symphony, most people could comfortably manage three to five sessions at a time before context switching became painful. OpenAI reports a 500% increase in landed pull requests on some teams from Symphony as a whole.
- Use it when
- One engineer steers a few agent sessions by hand and the number of open tasks keeps growing.
- Before applying it
- More agents open more pull requests at once, so check runner capacity and queue time before raising the number of parallel agents.
- GitHub Actions adaptation
- Compare the source system with your own workflow before applying this translation.
Company Playbooks
- Read Anthropic’s playbookRun only affected tests
- Read DoorDash’s playbookRun build and test in parallel, sharded across CI agents
- Read Linear’s playbookBenchmark the same job on faster hardware
- Read Mastra’s playbookStarSling runners for the slowest test workflow
- Read OpenAI’s playbookRank CI fixes by the minutes they save
- Read Ramp’s playbookMove a CPU-bound test suite to a faster CPU
- Read Shopify’s playbookLet an agent iterate against one CI metric
- Read Spotify’s playbookBuild arm64 on native arm64 runners
- Read Stripe’s playbookRun only the tests a change can reach
- Read Uber’s playbookBuild the merge-queue speculations most likely to be needed