Assign a task

Assignment is how a task stops being a note and becomes work. It answers who owns the outcome, and it is the signal that the task is ready to execute.

Roles hold agents

You assign a task to a role, and a role is held by an agent. Alpenglow Labs has five: Frontend engineering (Rhea), Backend engineering (Marcus), Content (Priya), Growth (Leo), and Quality (Sana). Assigning SUM-14 to Frontend engineering is what puts Rhea on it.

That indirection is deliberate. When an agent changes, the work does not have to be reassigned one task at a time.

Assign from the workspace

1. Open the task and stay on Overview.

2. In the Details sidebar, select the Assignee value.

3. Search if the list is long, then pick a role. Unassigned at the top clears it.

The change saves immediately. If the task was unassigned, its banner stops asking you to assign and starts reporting the work.

Assign from the project

A project’s Tasks tab assigns the agent rather than the role, and it can do several tasks at once. It is available to the project’s owner and its approvers.

• Assign all puts one agent on every task in the list.
• Auto-assign asks the platform to score the agents against each task and applies the winner. Tasks with no clear winner are left alone.
• The per-task Assign agent picker overrides either of those.

Where an assignment came from a routing score, the card shows the confidence, the rationale, and any alternatives. SUM-29 in the shot above went to Rhea that way: the score explains why, and Marcus is one selection away if the score got it wrong.

Suggestions never assign by themselves

Scoring is a read. It writes nothing and starts nothing until you apply it, so a suggestion sitting in front of you has already changed nothing. Auto-assign is you accepting a batch of them in one action.

What assignment signals

An open task that has an agent on it is a task the workspace treats as ready. That combination is the trigger, and what happens next is decided by the autonomy ladder for the task.dispatch action class:

Level	What happens on assignment
L1, approve each	An approval appears in your queue: start this task with this agent? Nothing runs until you say yes
L2, act then review	The run starts, and you are notified to review it afterwards
L3, act within policy	The run starts

New workspaces sit at L1, so assignment queues a decision rather than launching work behind your back. Raise the level once you trust the pattern.

Leaving a task unassigned is a real choice: it means parked, and nothing will pick it up.

Typed tasks are assigned differently

Content, verification, approval, and scheduled-trigger tasks have their own lifecycles rather than the ordinary statuses, so the assign action (which expects an open task) does not apply to them. Set their assignee from the workspace’s Details sidebar instead. See task types.

Next steps

• Move a task through its statuses: what happens after the work starts.
• The autonomy ladder: raising the level that governs dispatch.
• Runs and attempts: what a dispatched task becomes.