Show HN: VS Code Agent Kanban: Task Management for the AI-Assisted Developer (appsoftware.com)

99 points by gbro3n ↗ HN
Agent Kanban has 4 main features:

GitOps & team friendly kanban board integration inside VS Code Structured plan / todo / implement via @kanban commands Leverages your existing agent harness rather than trying to bundle a built in one .md task format provides a permanent (editable) source of truth including considerations, decisions and actions, that is resistant to context rot

34 comments

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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.

What I don't get is why not just use GitHub/Jira kanban directly with the CLI. We don't put them in git for multiple reasons. What are the people who only work in the browser going to do with this?

It reminds me of how Zed wants to have built in Slack when it will be impossible to get everyone to use Zed. A feature that can never really materialize because developers get a say in their tools

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?

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.

This is interesting. We've seen markdown as the app. This is markdown as the database for your tasks.
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.
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.

Lane position should be managed by putting files into different folders.

Name and dates can also be stored in the filename and file metadata.

Every time I see this phrase: "Why This Matters"

I wish I could unread it.

You're absolutely right! And here's why it matters—
Excited to see many version of such tools to pop up, was also planning on building my own actually. Hope people can share the most competitive ones here in the comments.
“Context rot” with AI coding tools is definitely real. After a few sessions the agent forgets earlier decisions, and you end up repeating the same planning conversation again.

Storing the plan and discussion as Markdown in Git is an interesting approach. It basically treats the agent’s reasoning as part of the project history, not just the final code.

Curious if others here are doing something similar to keep context across sessions.

Sorry for the slightly unrelated comment, but the amount of AI written slop comments here is so high. Was this caused by mentioning "AI" in the title?
The .md task format as persistent source of truth is the key insight. Context rot is a real problem mid-sprint when agents lose track of earlier decisions. Do you diff against previous state if the agent rewrites a task file mid-execution, or does the human review before committing?
OpenKanban is pretty cool if you’re on the other end and want to use Terminal for both Coding and Task/Project management. It’s almost as good as a Terminal version of VibeKanban, but not so feature rich - https://github.com/TechDufus/openkanban
I think a container of Kanboard https://kanboard.org/ and an MCP integration would achieve something similar - mostly cause when I think of project management tools that is the only one that actually feels insanely snappy, compared to the slowness of Jira, OpenProject and tbh Trello is also slower.

Would actually be cool to have more local tools like that, that something like Claude Code can integrate with. Find a bug in the code of your own implementation? Comment it in the issue, or add a new thing to fix, then at the end of implementation do a small retro and maybe end up with a SHORT sentence to add to CLAUDE.md on what to look out for in the particular project, OR create a new work item to make some additional prebuild scripts or tests.

Can we stop all these vibe-coded projects landing on the front page? It is annoying. Just feels like reddit.
Does it gather code level context itself ? Or we need to provide ?