Columns.

The default four

• Backlog. The parking lot. Ideas, bugs, wishes; not committed to anything yet.
• Todo. Decided for this sprint, not started.
• Doing. Actively worked on. Marked with semantic="doing" internally — moving a task here starts cycle-time tracking.
• Done. Shipped. Marked with semantic="done" — moving a task here records the completion timestamp. Done is a buffer, not a museum: completing a sprint sweeps its finished tasks into the sprint's history, and “Archive all” (or the archive_done_tasks tool) clears the rest — off the board, still searchable.

Work in progress

Limiting work in progress is the most important Kanban idea — without it, Doing turns into a second Backlog. Weft does not put a number on a column, because a number nothing enforces only looks like a rule. It limits the thing that actually runs out: your attention.

When finished work and questions waiting for you reach 5 items (10 in a team workspace, or about 45 minutes of review), agents stop starting new tasks — start_task answers attention_queue_full — until you clear the queue. Agents can still report progress on what they hold. To keep your own Doing small, just ask your AI to finish one thing before it pulls the next.

Renaming and adding columns

You can rename columns and add more via the board UI. The semantic markers (doing, done) can move with them — if you rename Doing to “In flight”, cycle time still tracks from “In flight”.

That said, more columns is almost never better. Four columns is enough to capture the phases that matter and not so many that work gets stuck in transit.