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The life of an action

An action starts as a recommendation, gets started, worked, drafted, approved and published. Here is every state it can be in and whose turn it is.

In 10 seconds

The short version

Your board is a short list of specific jobs: this page needs writing, this claim needs a source, this profile needs correcting. On Starter it holds six fixed tasks, each coming back on its own schedule; on Growth and above, EOMA also turns every week's findings into new ones.

The board is cut by whose turn it is. Waiting for you to start holds the offers nobody has taken. EOMA does these holds the work EOMA has claimed and is working on. Waiting for your review holds everything that has stopped until you decide something. EOMA can do any action on the board, and you can do any of them yourself with the steps inside it.

Nothing happens on a row until you press Start. Before that it is an offer, not work in flight. This distinction was worth rebuilding the board over: rows sitting under a header saying "EOMA is handling these" while nothing had been charged and nothing was running read as progress that did not exist.

Once started, the row is claimed, an agent works it, and it comes back to you with something to approve. The whole rest of this page is the vocabulary for the middle part.

How it works

  1. The row is generated. A fixed task arrives on its own schedule and comes back after you finish it, never more than one returning in the same week. On Growth and above, EOMA also writes new recommendations every week, up to ten open at a time, and tops the list up as you close things, so the board never becomes a backlog nobody reads.

  2. You press Start, and EOMA takes the job. A confirmation says what happens and what it uses: EOMA starts working and comes back with a draft in about two days, nothing is published until you approve it, and the job is counted on your plan. On Free and Starter it says how many jobs will be left; on Growth and Scale it says the job holds one of the places running at once until it finishes. There is no un-start. If you would rather handle a row yourself, open it and follow its steps, or use "I've already done this"; neither uses anything.

  3. An agent works it. It reads your brand data, decides whether the recommendation is still valid, prepares the work, and posts progress onto the row as it goes. If it needs a fact only you have, it stops and asks.

  4. A draft comes back for approval. For most kinds of work the agent produces something concrete — a page, a schema block, a correction — and parks it. Nothing goes anywhere until you approve.

  5. You choose the destination. Approving opens a fork, because the two destinations do not promise the same thing:

    Destination What happens
    Your site (WordPress) The draft is written to your live site as it stands. Visitors see it immediately, and the action closes itself as done.
    Your code repository (GitHub) A pull request is opened. Nothing is written directly, you see the change line by line, and nothing goes live until you merge.
  6. The row closes. On the live-site path it closes automatically. On the pull request path, someone has to confirm the change is actually live.

The states a row can be in, and what each one means in plain terms:

The board says It means Whose turn
Waiting for you to start An offer nobody has taken. Nothing has been used. Yours, if you want it
Working on it An agent is actively progressing it EOMA
Needs your input The agent asked a question it cannot answer for you Yours
Review the draft Work is finished and parked, waiting on your approval Yours
Review & merge A pull request is open on your repository Yours
Connect to publish The work exists but there is no connected site to send it to Yours
Approved, not yet out You approved and the publish has not fired yet EOMA
Published, not closed It went out and nobody has confirmed it EOMA
Done / Failed Terminal. Stays in your notifications for seven days, then it is history Nobody

An unstarted row never waits on anybody. If a row is asking you for something, it has been started.

What this means for you

Start is irreversible and it takes a seat. There is no un-start. On Growth three jobs can be in flight at once (six on Scale) and a seat frees the moment one reaches done or is removed. On Free EOMA does 2 jobs for you and on Starter 3; that number is for the life of the plan, and a job does not come back when it finishes. When Starter's are used, Start says so and points you to the action's own steps and to the plans; on Free the other cards wait behind a lock until you upgrade. The seat meter counts the rows in the in-progress band, so the two cannot disagree — with one short-lived exception: work already in flight before 2026-09-08 does not take a seat, so until those jobs finish the band can hold more rows than you have seats.

"Connect to publish" ranks below anything already finished. A parked draft on a brand with no connected site still says review the draft, not connect something first — because you can open it, export it as Markdown, HTML or PDF, copy it as a prompt, apply it yourself, and mark the row done. Connecting a site makes that automatic; it is not a gate on getting the work.

When you merge a pull request, EOMA does not notice on its own yet. There is no webhook watching your repository, so the row stays In progress until somebody closes it. One customer's pull request sat open for eight days looking like work in flight. If you merge something, tell us or close the row — this is a known gap and it is being fixed.

A row that says nothing for days is worth asking about. The board shows "taken on N days ago · no update yet" for exactly this reason.

Removing a suggestion is allowed, and only before it starts. A row you have started cannot be dismissed; a row you have not can, and it can be restored.

Common misunderstandings

People assume Actually
"The recommendations are EOMA's to-do list, so they will get done." Nothing is claimed until you press Start. Before that a row is an offer, and it waits under Waiting for you to start until you take it or do it yourself.
"Approving publishes it." Approving asks where it should go. The live-site path publishes immediately; the repository path opens a pull request and stops.
"If EOMA cannot publish it, I cannot use it." Every draft waiting for you can be taken away as Markdown, HTML or PDF, or copied as a prompt, from its last step. Before a draft exists, the action's instructions can be copied as a prompt for your own AI.
"In progress · 3/6 means I have used three of my six." It means three are running and your bank holds six. The note beside it says how many remain.
"I can start six things and pause four." Starting uses the job at the moment of the click. There is no pause and no refund.
"Failed means EOMA broke." Often it means the work could not be completed as scoped — a site that blocks access, a fact nobody could confirm. The row carries the reason.
Reading this as a machine? The same page in Markdown: /docs/concepts/life-of-an-action.md

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