TeaHouses

A TeaHouse is the team boundary in Coldtea.

It groups the people, task boards, and connected services that should see the same shared work. Your local project still lives on your machine. A TeaHouse decides which Coldtea team surfaces you can use around that project.

What a TeaHouse owns

A TeaHouse can hold:

• Members and invitations.
• Task boards.
• Workflow states, labels, and task activity.
• Connected services such as Linear and GitHub.
• Matcha QA and other team settings.

Think of it as the place where shared context is scoped. If you are in the wrong TeaHouse, the task board, integration status, and team settings may all look wrong even when the local repo is fine.

Boards

A TeaHouse can contain one or more task boards. TeaHouse owners add one from New board in the board switcher, with a name and a short key that prefixes its task ids (for example SID-1).

Coldtea remembers your last used board, but switching TeaHouse or board changes the shared task surface you are looking at. Use that switch when a task is missing before assuming sync failed.

Boards carry their own workflow states and labels. That is why two boards in the same TeaHouse can have different columns or task flows.

Members and roles

Coldtea currently shows two TeaHouse roles:

• Owner: can invite people and revoke pending invitations.
• Member: can view members and use the TeaHouse surfaces they have access to.

Invites include an email address, a role, and the boards the person should see first. Pending invites can expire or be revoked.

Do not treat a Coldtea role as a replacement for every downstream permission. A person may be a TeaHouse member and still lack access to a GitHub repository, a Linear issue, or a private service used by the repo.

Integrations stay scoped

Integrations are connected from the TeaHouse settings area. For connected tools:

• Coldtea needs the active TeaHouse to know which integration to use.
• The upstream provider still decides what the connected account or app can see.
• Local Git still uses the credentials and remotes configured on your machine.

If access looks wrong, check both sides: the Coldtea TeaHouse/board and the provider account or installation.

Local projects are still local

Joining a TeaHouse does not give teammates access to your filesystem. It gives access to shared Coldtea surfaces such as tasks, logs, plans, and integration-backed context, depending on the feature.

Keep private machine details out of shared task descriptions and logs unless your team has agreed that they belong there.

Next: team workflows or permissions.