Work on several things at once

A Trove lane is one unit of concurrent effort: one worktree, one session, working one plan or one work unit. Lanes run side by side, so the interesting question is not "how do I open several editors" but "how do I keep several lanes usefully busy".

Describe the work once

Author in a single OPAL conversation — see Create a spec. You do not need a conversation per spec, and there is no card to select first. Ask about any spec at any time; the model searches the database and answers about whichever one you mean.

This is the part that used to need a desk full of panes. It no longer does, because the specs are not documents scattered across branches any more.

Break it into units

Ask Trove to split the work into work units. A unit is the granule a lane picks up: small enough that finishing it means something, with a Definition of Done that says how you would know.

Units can note that they depend on others. That is advice, not a gate — Trove prefers to hand out units whose dependencies are finished, but it will hand one out anyway rather than let a typo in a key stall a plan forever. Nothing deadlocks waiting for a unit somebody deleted.

Let the lanes run

Ask Trove to run a plan, and it spreads the units across the available lanes. Each lane:

• claims its unit, so no two lanes ever work the same one
• runs a session in its own worktree, with the unit's instruction and Definition of Done in front of it
• reports status back as it goes

A claim is a lease, not a lock. If a lane dies mid-unit, the lease expires and the unit becomes available again — a crashed session cannot make work permanently unclaimable.

Watch from the board

Open Trove from the apps menu, double-click a project, and use the Build tab. Each lane's card shows what it is working on and what its session is doing right now. Double-click a card to drop into the transcript.

You do not have to watch. The point of lanes is that they keep going when you are not looking; the board is there for when you want to know, not something you have to attend.

Ask for progress instead

You can also just ask: "how is the gait plan doing?" Progress is derived from the units' own status, so the answer is counted rather than reported — nothing has to remember to update a percentage.