the markdown-as-database framing is the right one. we ran into the same Jira friction for our agent fleet and ended up with a simple REST task board instead.
the key insight: agents need a shared state store they can both read and mutate without human-mediated handoffs. markdown files work fine for single-agent. once you have multiple agents racing on tasks you want atomic PATCH semantics, not file locks.
I am using another VSCode Kanban extension. Very similar workflow to this one. I am very happy with it, it solved many issues I am having with context.
That's a nice UI on that board. It's advertising the ability to allow the agent to help manage tasks, where this approach uses the tasks to drive the agent.
For a long time I've been an agile fundamentalist. I welcome agent assisted coding because it reduces team size and increases autonomy, experimentation, and generally makes self organizing teams a more obvious choice.
Highly structured pseudo agile practices like scrum, never mind SAfE, make even less sense now than they did before. Flat collegial teams for the win.
I would say that a kanban board is not synonymous with scrum. In this workflow, the tasks are a way of organising task threads and recording the consideration, decisions and actions taken while working with an AI agent.
I can certainly see the appeal of distributing the context with vc. However, I have always imagined this to be integrated into an existing kanban workflow, similar to a Jira or gh issue board. Perhaps agent specific, perhaps not.
Furthermore, an existing kanban (ticket) workflow will expect you to refine the context into something more ... concentrated, or at least something that we are used to seeing as developers working with tickets, at least more so than the chat history that seem to be favored.
Have you put any thought into how this would integrate into such a process?
I did - GitHub and Trello (and I expect Jira) have APIs that could be used to hook up an MCP server. I liked the idea of conversing with the agent in the ticket, but I decided against that because I'd have to keep refreshing the issues, and it seemed a bit janky moving in and out of the IDE.
I also considered a full harness that could stream / sync the responses, but as per my comment below, implementing a full harness meant loosing a lot of the IDE integration features that come with the hand off to GitHub Copilot.
> I went down the route of implementing a full harness for a while like Vibe Kanban, but the issue was that it was unlikely (without significant effort) to be as good as Github Copilot chat, and it meant forfeiting all of the IDE integrations etc (like diff visualisation for the agents actions etc).
Having worked with a flow similar to this for a while - the markdown files become quite valuable as a history of planning and decisions for features. I didn't want to loose that. I just needed some help with managing the plan files I was maintaining - which the kanban board tooling does. A few command shortcuts via @kanban help too
Regarding what goes into the files, the agent tends to be quite concise - you don't see the whole train of thought that some of the harnesses surface.
Great to see more products in this space! Definitely going to try this out on desktop.
I’m doing a fair amount of work on mobile, and prompting remote agents. I would love someone to build an OSS cross-platform kanban. It’d probably be complex to add triggers of workflows both locally and remotely though.
Maybe it will go that way eventually. I haven't got into being able to hand off to agents in the cloud yet, I think as good as LLMs are getting, for complex / professional work the agents still need a lot of steering. I just have to be in the editor with the agent!
There's also https://github.com/openai/symphony that's being developed following a similar Kanban pattern based agent manager (though yours is more sophisticated at the moment imo)
Interesting to see the Kanban workflow being adapted to managing agents, makes sense; each item having the same UX as a Github Issue.
Thanks. I also saw Vibe Kanban which looked quite mature with lots of features. But I was really liking working with markdown files in VS Code - with everything that comes with that (version control capability etc). I went down the route of implementing a full harness for a while like Vibe Kanban, but the issue was that it was unlikely (without significant effort) to be as good as Github Copilot chat, and it meant forfeiting all of the IDE integrations etc (like diff visualisation for the agents actions etc).
Having the Kanban board in VS Code where I'm working, backed by markdown, GitOps friendly files works really well. Moving from the markdown file to the chat editor to type 'plan', 'implement' isn't what I really wanted, but it's really not a problem once you get used to the flow.
I had claude build me something similar for my own autonomous agent system, because I was irritated at how much friction Jira has. I suspect a lot of people will do this.
the key insight: agents need a shared state store they can both read and mutate without human-mediated handoffs. markdown files work fine for single-agent. once you have multiple agents racing on tasks you want atomic PATCH semantics, not file locks.
https://github.com/LachyFS/kanban-markdown-vscode-extension
Highly structured pseudo agile practices like scrum, never mind SAfE, make even less sense now than they did before. Flat collegial teams for the win.
Youtube (Quick demo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4a3FnFftKw
GitHub: https://github.com/appsoftwareltd/vscode-agent-kanban
Furthermore, an existing kanban (ticket) workflow will expect you to refine the context into something more ... concentrated, or at least something that we are used to seeing as developers working with tickets, at least more so than the chat history that seem to be favored.
Have you put any thought into how this would integrate into such a process?
I also considered a full harness that could stream / sync the responses, but as per my comment below, implementing a full harness meant loosing a lot of the IDE integration features that come with the hand off to GitHub Copilot.
> I went down the route of implementing a full harness for a while like Vibe Kanban, but the issue was that it was unlikely (without significant effort) to be as good as Github Copilot chat, and it meant forfeiting all of the IDE integrations etc (like diff visualisation for the agents actions etc).
Having worked with a flow similar to this for a while - the markdown files become quite valuable as a history of planning and decisions for features. I didn't want to loose that. I just needed some help with managing the plan files I was maintaining - which the kanban board tooling does. A few command shortcuts via @kanban help too
Regarding what goes into the files, the agent tends to be quite concise - you don't see the whole train of thought that some of the harnesses surface.
I’m doing a fair amount of work on mobile, and prompting remote agents. I would love someone to build an OSS cross-platform kanban. It’d probably be complex to add triggers of workflows both locally and remotely though.
Interesting to see the Kanban workflow being adapted to managing agents, makes sense; each item having the same UX as a Github Issue.
Having the Kanban board in VS Code where I'm working, backed by markdown, GitOps friendly files works really well. Moving from the markdown file to the chat editor to type 'plan', 'implement' isn't what I really wanted, but it's really not a problem once you get used to the flow.