Assigning to agents and bots

Assign an issue to a person, a coding agent or a bot, what that creates in the task ledger, and who is recorded as the assigner.

An issue can be assigned to a person, an agent (claude-code or codex) or a bot registered for your team. Every assignment records who made it.

overlane issue assign iss_ab12cd34ef56gh78 human:u-pat
overlane issue assign iss_ab12cd34ef56gh78 agent:claude-code
overlane issue assign iss_ab12cd34ef56gh78 bot:bot_ab12cd34ef56
overlane issue assign iss_ab12cd34ef56gh78 none

What happens

Assignee	Result
Person	The assignee is recorded. A backlog issue moves to `todo`. No task is created.
Agent	The issue’s one active task is created (or reused), ranked by the issue’s priority in the task queue. The agent picks it up with `overlane task next`.
Bot	The same task, plus an assignment for the bot and a signed `task.assigned` event queued for its webhook.
`none`	The assignee is cleared. An existing task is kept.

Assigning again to the same or another agent reuses the active task, so an issue never has two. The response includes the taskId and whether it was newly created.

An issue that is done or cancelled cannot be assigned; reopen it first.

Who may assign

Owners, admins, members and agent tokens can assign. A viewer gets 403 forbidden with the rule ID; viewers have no write routes. Assigning to a bot needs a bot that is registered and not revoked for your team.

Finishing the work

The agent works the task like any other: it claims, checkpoints, submits and records evidence. When the task is verified the issue becomes done. Nothing else closes it. See Tasks and priority.

API

POST /v1/tenants/{tenantId}/projects/{projectId}/issues/{issueId}/assign with a requestId and an assignee of type human, agent or bot (or null). Repeating the same requestId returns the first answer.