Where a phase is drawn

A phase card stands for cards the kanban no longer lists. What the columns say instead, what the phase card owes in return, and the view that gives every phase a lane of its own.

The Board is the work you are personally holding, in five columns that fit, so a phase's members are not drawn there. Nothing is deleted, moved or marked: a member keeps its stage, its file, its agent and its actions, and the Board simply stops listing it. A column's number is therefore the number of cards you can see in it — true by construction rather than true-with-a-footnote — with +2 in phases beside it saying where the rest went, and only where members are actually hidden. A board with no phase card on it renders exactly what it always did.

Membership is the only thing that hides a card, so removing membership is the un-hiding, with no sweep and no second rule: archive the phase card, drop a number from its ## Cards list, or let the phase reach done/ — it holds nothing once it is over — and its former members are back in the columns they are genuinely in. Which, when the phase got there by being merged, is done/: the merge moved them (see "Finishing a phase finishes its cards"). The other two endings move nothing, so the cards they release are wherever they actually were. A membership that did not resolve hides nothing either: a card wearing phase drift stays on the board, because an authoring mistake must not make work vanish.

That leaves the phase card standing for all of it, so it carries the summary it owes: a ⟶ 1 of 2 merged chip in the footer row that opens its own sheet (the member list, in run order, with each one's stage), the member in flight on its activity line, and a run that halted worn in --alarm like any other stopped work. Only the Board hides. Sessions and Focus are about runs, not stages, and a phase member's agent is an agent like any other — it is counted by the header's live chip and by the tab title wherever it is working.

Where they are drawn instead is the next section. Filtering the board to a phase's cards, and a Focus view for a phase, remain separate cards.

The Phases view: a swimlane each

Where the members went. A fourth view beside Board, Sessions and Focus, holding one lane per phase card — every phase there is, not only the running ones, because a phase whose cards are all merged and which is waiting on its own PR still owns them, and a lane that vanished exactly when it needed merging would be a view you could not trust. Lanes are ordered so a halt is never below the fold: halted, then running, then the phases nobody has started, then the ones that are over. With no phase anywhere the view says so in a sentence rather than drawing an empty grid.

A lane is a head, five stage columns and the phase's log:

• The head — the phase, its progress (2 of 3 merged), the member in flight on the same activity line a card would use, and its own controls: ‖ hold, the phase branch, and the phase card, which opens in the drawer. Those are all of them. Nothing here ends a phase — merging is a board move on the phase card, and there is exactly one place where work leaves the board.
• Five columns, and the last one is the phase's own. Four are the board's stages; the fifth is Merged in, not done/, because a member merged into the phase branch is finished as far as the phase is concerned and is not in main yet. A member is drawn in the stage it is actually in until the phase branch holds it, and then in that last column whatever its card says. Which members the branch holds is the runner's last pass while a phase is running, and the phase log once there are no more passes — the same fact, written down by the same runner, which is what keeps a phase in review/ from drawing a lane where nothing ever landed.
• The cards are the cards. cardFor() builds them here exactly as it builds them for the Board: the live agent line, the CI and PR chips, the ⟶ <phase> 2/3 chip that says where each sits in the run, and the same hover actions. Nothing is shrunk to a token — that fidelity is the whole advantage a room of its own buys.
• The phase log, under the lane — the runner's decisions in the order it made them, read off the ## Phase log section of the phase card itself. It is the only thing that can tell "the phase has not reached this card" from "it started it and it ended badly", and until this view it had nowhere to be shown.

A halted lane says so at the top of itself: the reason, the card it stopped on, and ▸ run again beneath them. That action lives here and not on the Board, because clearing a halt should mean having read what caused it — the Board's halted phase card offers ⟶ phases in its place, and ‖ hold, which needs nothing read.

The crossing matters more than the lane: a person on the Board has to learn that a phase halted without being on this view, and a person here has to be able to get back to the card that owns it. So the switcher carries the running count and, in --alarm, a mark when something has halted — on every view, holding until the phase is run again or held, alongside the toast and the ticker line that already fire. And the lane head's title and its card ↗ chip open the phase card.