Clusters, Sizes & Briefs

Capture enough nits and the backlog turns into a pile. Triage turns the pile into a plan: a coding agent reads your open issues and organizes them, without fixing anything and without ever touching your source code.

Clusters

Triage groups related open issues into clusters — session-sized bundles that share a screen, a component, or a root cause (“Settings dialog spacing”, “Dark-mode contrast issues”). Each cluster gets a short label and a one-line theme summary, and the Backlog regroups around them as cards. Issues that don’t relate to anything stay in an Ungrouped card.

Clusters are the unit of agent work: “fix one cluster” is one focused, reviewable session. They’re also the unit of parallelism — different agents can take different clusters at the same time.

Sizes

Triage estimates each sub-issue’s fix complexity as a size, S / M / L / XL (Small to Extra-large), shown as a chip in the Backlog. A cluster’s chip is its largest member’s size.

Sizes drive model routing. A one-line copy tweak (S) doesn’t need the same model as a cross-file refactor (XL), and nitpin dispatches each at the model tier you’ve configured for that size.

Briefs

Along with sizes, triage records a short brief for each issue when it has something useful to add: a code-level hint (“the padding constant lives in CardStyle”) or a likely location. Briefs carry the triage pass’s understanding into the fix pass so the fixing agent starts warm. They’re advisory; your notes remain the spec.

Your corrections stick

Triage proposes; you dispose. Drag an issue out of a cluster (or into another one) and nitpin records it as an override. Future triage passes keep your correction unless the backlog has genuinely changed around it.

Next: Running Triage · Splitting Issues