Chat is a serial interface for parallel work. Zelio gives every unit of work a card it can sit on, be owned, get blocked, and be reviewed. You approve the diff in five seconds instead of reading a transcript for ten minutes.
npx zelioThe account only carries tickets and comments. Code, diffs and agent transcripts never leave your machine.
Scrollback is not a record. Come back an hour later and you cannot tell what finished, what stalled, and what silently did something else.
Nothing says which agent is on which task. You hold that in your head, so you become the scheduler.
You approve work by reading a wall of text and hoping the diff was what you meant. Nobody keeps doing that.
| Chat | Zelio | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the record lives | scrollback | the ticket |
| Who owns the task | your memory | the agent, visibly |
| Parallel work | one thread, interleaved | one ticket each |
| Reviewing output | read the transcript | read the diff |
| When an agent stalls | you notice hours later | blocked, with a reason |
Seven steps, one of which is yours.
Capture
Describe the work in a sentence. No form, no schema — wishing is free.
Promote
The planner drafts the ticket and its acceptance criteria. You confirm or discard.
Assign
Pick a profile. Assigning picks who; it does not start work.
Start
The card locks and the agent gets its own git worktree, so parallel tickets stay mergeable.
Watch
Typed comments only: decision, blocker, done. Not a chat thread.
Review
The agent moves its own card to Review and attaches the diff. You read a change, not a transcript.
Decide
Approve and merge, or send it back with a note. Nothing lands on main without you.
Status can't lie
The agent doing the work owns the ticket's status.
Assign ≠ run
Accidental runs are how people stop trusting a tool that touches their repo.
The human merges
Agents propose. You approve.
A worktree per ticket
A failed attempt retries without polluting main.