How Agents Work Your Backlog

nitpin’s other half is the agent side: your coding agent reads captured issues over MCP, looks at the actual screenshots, fixes the code, and records what it changed. This chapter is the mental model; the following ones cover each piece.

The pieces

• The MCP server. The nitpin CLI doubles as an MCP server your agent starts automatically (it’s wired in by nitpin init per-repo, or nitpin install globally). It serves issues, screenshots, claims, triage, and resolutions — the full surface is in the MCP Tools reference.
• The skill. A nitpin skill teaches your agent the loop. When you say “check nitpin”, it knows to triage if needed, claim one cluster, look at the pins, fix, and resolve. See The nitpin Skill.
• Supported agents: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and Pi. nitpin install wires any or all of them.

What an agent sees

When an agent opens an issue it gets your notes and body verbatim, plus focused imagery: a small crop around each pin or region — badges drawn on, so “the button #2 points at” is unambiguous — and a downscaled overview of the whole frame. It can ask for the full frame or the fully annotated render when it needs more context, and any images you pasted into notes ride along as part of the intent. Live captures also carry each mark’s CSS selector, which usually lands the agent in the right component in one hop.

What an agent does — and can’t do

An agent working your backlog will:

• claim what it’s working so other agents skip it (Claims),
• narrate — a one-line progress note you watch live in the Cockpit,
• fix one sub-issue at a time, each as its own commit,
• resolve each sub-issue with a short note (and the commit that fixed it), rating its own confidence so you know what to spot-check,
• comment when a note is ambiguous instead of guessing (configurable — see involvement),
• suggest out-of-scope improvements as pending issues for your review.

It can never edit your notes or screenshots, never resolves an issue wholesale (state rolls up from sub-issues), and — like nitpin itself — never drives your app.

Two ways to put agents to work

1. From your agent — type /nitpin or just talk to it. Best when you’re already in the terminal and want to watch. See The nitpin Skill.
2. From nitpin — click Fix on an issue or cluster, or run Autopilot over the whole backlog; nitpin launches and supervises the agents for you, routing each unit of work to the right model by size. See Dispatching Fixes and Task Models.