Comments & collaboration

Discussion in cadence. attaches to the thing being discussed, rather than living in a separate channel where it loses its context within a week.

Where you can comment#

Comments can be left on four things:

• Tasks — the detail of one piece of work.
• Phases — decisions about the gate itself. "We are accepting the conditional pass on stability because…" belongs here.
• Projects — status and direction.
• Tags — portfolio-level discussion, spanning the projects under that tag.

Choosing the right level matters more than it sounds. A decision recorded on a phase is still findable when the tasks it concerned are long closed.

Writing comments#

The comment editor supports rich text, emoji and mentions.

Type @ to mention a teammate. Mentioning someone notifies them directly — it is the reliable way to get an answer, as opposed to hoping the right person is watching the task.

Comments can be edited and deleted after posting.

Who gets notified#

Commenting notifies:

• anyone you @-mention,
• the assignee, if the comment is on a task assigned to someone,
• everyone who has already commented on that task.

That last rule means a thread keeps its participants without anyone having to subscribe.

Reactions#

React with an emoji to a comment, a task or a project. Reactions are aggregated — you see each emoji, its count, and who reacted.

Reactions are not decoration here. A 👍 on a status update is an acknowledgement that would otherwise be a comment nobody needed to read, and it generates its own notification so the acknowledgement actually lands.

Attachments#

Files attach to tasks: specs, reports, artwork, test data. See managing tasks.

For evidence backing a gate criterion, prefer the criterion's evidence field, with the file attached to the task the evidence came from. That keeps the audit trail on the gate where an auditor will look for it.

Presence#

On shared pages you will see avatars for whoever else is viewing right now. It exists to prevent the small collisions — two people rewriting the same status, or one person waiting on a colleague who is already in the same screen.

Activity history#

Every project has an Activity view: comments and changes in chronological order, across the project, its phases and its tasks. When you need to reconstruct what was known and when, that is the page.

Over the API#

Comments are readable and writable through the REST API and the MCP server. A comment posted by an integration is attributed to the identity that owns the API key, so it is clear which system said it.