Skip to main content
An epic is a body of work with a single goal. It contains zero or more features and zero or more fixes. Epics are the top-level grouping on the board — every feature and fix belongs to exactly one epic. If you’ve used Jira, this maps to a Jira epic. If you’ve used Linear, it maps to a Linear project.

​
Where epics live

Epics live in the .tiny-brain/ directory of your repo:
The directory name is the epic ID. The epic.md file inside it carries the title, description, and goals. Features and fixes are siblings of epic.md, linked back via their epic: frontmatter field.

​
Cross-project epics

By default an epic lives in one repository. For work that spans multiple repos (e.g. a feature change that touches both no-tickets-service and no-tickets), epics can span projects. A cross-project epic is declared by its id appearing in multiple projects’ .tiny-brain/ directories with the same id and type: epic. The dashboard fuses them: one epic card on the board, features and fixes from both projects listed underneath. The fuse is by id, not by title — keep epic IDs unique within a team if you don’t want this behaviour.

​
Epic vs feature

If you’re tempted to put tasks directly under an epic, split it into features instead.

​
Phase rollup

An epic’s “phase” on the board is computed, not declared. The dashboard shows a small distribution bar: how many features/fixes are in each phase. An epic is rendered as “done” only when every child is phase: done. The rollup is in the dashboard only — there is no phase field on an epic’s markdown file. Adding one is ignored.

​
See also