Open specificationAug 14, 20262 min read

Issuegraph: a work graph for autonomous engineering

Name: Descant
Brand: Descant

A simple, vendor-agnostic way to make dependencies and ordering understandable inside the issue trackers teams already use.

The Issuegraph demo. A numbered work order on the left. Lines connect related issues: one issue blocks the next, two issues are worked together as one unit, three issues are serialized, one was decomposed from a larger issue, and one is a duplicate that is not worked. — A capture of the Issuegraph demo. It orders a sample backlog and draws each relationship that explains the order. Try it in your browser.

A backlog has a shape

A list of issues tells you what exists. Coordinating the work also requires knowing how those issues relate. One change may depend on another. Two tasks may need to happen in sequence. Several smaller issues may come from the same larger goal. As more work happens autonomously, those relationships need a form that software can read consistently.

We created Issuegraph to express that structure inside existing issue trackers. The first public specification took shape on August 14. It gives work relationships a small, explicit, vendor-agnostic format, so the reasoning about what can happen next does not depend on a particular model remembering an earlier conversation.

Keep work where teams already manage it

The useful part is the shared contract. A team can keep its issues, priorities, and discussions in the place it already uses, while tools read the relationships needed to coordinate execution. A larger goal can remain visible as its smaller pieces are filed and completed. Dependencies can be inspected rather than left implicit in a plan.

For Descant, that matters as engineering moves beyond one ticket at a time. Decomposed work needs to retain its ordering. A follow-up needs to connect to the change that revealed it. People need a practical way to see the structure and adjust it. The demo above shows that idea: a work order, and the relationships that explain it.

A foundation other tools can use

Issuegraph is an open specification stewarded by Autonomy. We want the work graph to remain useful across model providers, agent runtimes, and supporting tools. Explicit relationships provide a foundation for coordination even as the systems doing the work change.

The specification and its website are public. If you are building autonomous engineering tools or trying to make a substantial backlog easier for software to understand, take a look. Clear work relationships are a small piece of the overall system, but they support an important goal: consistent progress across many related changes.