Every piece of work in AITM starts as a Task. This page covers every field in the New Task modal and how to write prompts that get you a good result on the first try.
Creating a Task
The New Task modal
Click New Task to open the modal. You'll fill in:
- Title — a short, plain-English summary (max 60 characters). This is what you'll see in lists and notifications, so make it specific.
- Prompt — the actual instructions for the AI. Describe the goal, any constraints, and what "done" looks like. The more concrete you are about behavior and edge cases, the less back-and-forth you'll need.
- Priority — High, Medium, or Low. Higher-priority tasks are picked up first when several are queued.
- Project — which of your registered projects this task applies to.
- Worktree toggle — runs the task in an isolated git worktree so it can't conflict with other in-progress tasks. Leave this on unless you have a good reason to work directly on your main checkout.
- Pipeline toggle — runs the full 9-step pipeline (architect, code, review, fix, test, e2e, docs, merge) instead of a single raw AI pass.
- Auto-merge toggle — automatically merges the finished branch into
devonce review and tests pass, so you don't have to merge manually.
Dependent task chains
If one task's work must happen before another can start (for example, "add the database column" before "use the column in the API"), chain them. A chained task waits until its predecessor has merged into dev before it begins, so it always starts from a codebase that already contains the earlier change.
IntelliSense: _variable, @file, and #task
While typing a prompt, you can reference things directly instead of describing them in prose:
_variable— insert a reference to a tracked project variable (a named piece of behavior or UI element AITM already knows about).@file— insert a reference to a specific file in the project.#task— reference another task by number, useful for pointing back at related or prior work.
Start typing the trigger character and a dropdown appears with matching suggestions — pick one to insert it into the prompt.
Tips
- Use
_variableand@filereferences instead of describing code locations in prose — it's faster and unambiguous for the AI. - Chain tasks instead of writing one giant prompt when a change naturally splits into ordered steps.
- Keep the Title specific enough that you can find the task again later without opening it.