Today a Haunch task is a well-built container: you fill in the fields, tick the boxes, and remember everything around it yourself — what to do next, what a change just broke, who you're waiting on. This is a look at moving that remembering out of the engineer's head and into the system.
The current model is solid and familiar — numbered work items, like GitHub issues for engineering. Each one carries a title, a label, an assignee, a due date, a checklist, sub-tasks and an activity trail.
That's exactly right as a foundation. But notice what it asks of the engineer: every field is something you have to remember to set, and every consequence is something you have to remember to chase. The task records decisions — it doesn't help you make them.
Title, label, assignee, due date, checklist, sub-tasks, comments, a clean audit trail. Reliable, editable, numbered for life.
Decides what's next. Remembers what a calc revision broke. Knows what a “steel package” breaks into. Tracks who's blocked. Re-reads to catch up.
The system already hints at caring about this — it quietly tracks churn (“closed & reopened 4×”) as a signal that something's thrashing. The redesign takes that instinct and runs with it across five everyday moments.
Niall opens Haunch with twenty minutes before a call. Four projects, a dozen open tasks across them. He scans the overdue bucket, weighs a due date against who's stuck waiting on him, against what he can actually finish in twenty minutes — and burns three of those minutes just deciding.
Instead of a sorted list to re-triage, the system makes the call: the single task that matters most this minute — and shows why, so the engineer can trust it or overrule it in a glance. The next two wait quietly underneath.
Niall re-runs the beam calc after the roof finishes change. New revision uploaded, done. Except — it isn't. Somewhere in his head a quiet voice notes that S-01 and S-02 show that beam, and they're now wrong. If that voice is busy, the stale drawings ship.
This is the calc ↔ drawing thread, generalised into a rule: when an action has a known consequence, the system drafts the follow-up itself — affected artifacts already attached, the engineer's own revision note carried across. He confirms or dismisses. He never has to hold the graph.
A new extension lands. Niall types “Steel package” and stops — because he knows it really means a GA, sections, connection details, a member schedule, and the beam calc to back them. He's typed that same list on every extension for years.
Haunch already seeds projects from templates at handover. Bring that down to the task: a recognised piece of work proposes its own breakdown — learned from how this firm has done it before. Confirm the shape; don't re-author it.
Four days after he last touched it, Niall reopens the task. He scrolls the whole activity trail from the bottom, rebuilding the state in his head: Declan said something, the calc changed, was there a question for him? Two minutes of re-reading just to start.
The activity feed is an archive read bottom-up. Replace the top of it with a “since you were last here” briefing — what changed, what's waiting on you, in three lines — so the engineer lands already oriented.
Niall handed the re-issue to Declan on Monday. It's Wednesday. Is it done? Should he chase? Meanwhile Aoife's connection calcs can't start until Niall finalises the member sizes — and he's forgotten she's sitting there. Two silent dependencies, both living only in memory.
A task knows when it's blocked on someone and when it's blocking someone. It counts the days, nudges when waiting goes stale, and tells you the moment a dependency clears — so the chase isn't a thing the engineer has to remember to do.
None of this throws away the task we have. The number, the label, the assignee, the checklist, the audit trail — all stay. The shift is that the task starts doing the remembering, deciding and breaking-down the engineer does today.
One recommendation with its reasoning, instead of a list to re-triage every morning.
Drafts the follow-up when a cause happens; carries the note; counts the days a handoff waits.
built in the calc ↔ drawing hubA briefing on what changed and what it needs — so picking work back up takes seconds.
The system drafts tasks, picks priorities and suggests breakdowns — but the engineer always confirms. No silent automation in a discipline where someone signs the calc.
Every recommendation carries its “why”. A suggestion you can't interrogate is a suggestion you can't trust — and won't.
The point is less to decide, not more to read. If a feature adds cognitive load to save cognitive load, it doesn't ship.
Every intelligent layer sits on top of the plain numbered task. Turn it all off and you still have the tool you trust today.
None of this replaces the numbered task at the centre of Haunch — it layers intelligence on top, and every layer can be switched off. We're rolling these moments out one at a time, starting with the two closest to home: “Now” and the consequence cascade, both built on the calc ↔ drawing work already in the product.