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Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card
- rirze 5mo agoI see a bunch of these orchestrators, but is anything out there jj (jujitsu) native? I would really like to avoid hacking onto an existing product.
- waterproof 5mo agoIf Jujutsu had become popular a couple of years earlier, it might have had a chance to catch on. I worry that it missed the most critical training window for AI and we may be locked in on Git forever.
- rirze 5mo agoThis is not true at all, a year ago it was difficult to force models to use jj consistently, but nowadays, (codex+chatgpt, at the very least) models very nicely obey jj workflows when guided in AGENTS.md . They have been training models to use it. Edit: my original comment was related to how git worktrees are by default used in the implementation of these agent orchestration tools. I would rather prefer jj workspaces.
- othmarodev 5mo ago[flagged]
- vitriapp 5mo agoHello folks, sharing my latest open source project, a kanban board with parallel agents. Trying to improve this with more features, I would love your contributions on this repo, with either code contributions or ideas
- malfist 5mo agoYou should check out Stripe's dev blog about minions. Seems directionally similar.
- rigonkulous 5mo agoNice work .. I have had my own agents running kanban on existing Jira projects, categorized by workflow, and it is a pleasure to see your project on HN today. I will for sure enjoy catching up with your work, thanks for sharing it.
- cyclopeanutopia 5mo agoI don't understand this.
- genxy 5mo agoIt looks like a kanban interface to agent orchestration.
- cyclopeanutopia 5mo agoYeah, I still don't get it. What does the kanban interface add here?
- genxy 5mo agoNothing basically, a mock version of work and you get to see the virtual post it notes travel across the screen.
- wyre 5mo agoJust post the GitHub page if it’s open-source. It’s great you have a domain name, but if your website is going to look the same as every other SaaS product designed by Claude it’s really hard to look past that and look at the novelty or benefits of the product.
- fphilipe 5mo agoThese pages do look good. But they all just look the same. And I'm getting bored of them. I open such a page and I immediately know it was Claude that produced it (probably end-to-end). Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it lacks soul… and that makes me kind of sad.
- pbjerkeseth 5mo agoI've built/am building something similar, but I spent the first half of my tech career as a UI/UX designer before becoming a software engineer and I'd _like_ to think it shows, but there is something about designing-in-code with agents that leads to homogenous outputs if you don't spend equal time on visual design as on the technical parts. I'm a bit anxious about putting myself out there, but I'd be curious if my efforts cross that bar for you or not? https://ouijit.com/ https://ouijit.com/ (and the repo is at https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit)
- wyre 5mo agoLooks great. I can tell you put a lot of time and energy into making it look good. I think a lot of the problems with the homogenous outputs of front-end design wouldn't be such a problem if the models naturally make their designs so much simpler, but they are LLM's so they are always going to be overly verbose. I was curious so I had asked my agent to redesign and recreate your front page for comparison and it gave me this: https://ouijit-redesign.vercel.app https://ouijit-redesign.vercel.app
- pbjerkeseth 5mo agoHa, it obviously picked up on the ouija board concept with the colors and copy. I think the detail expansion shown is a great illustration of another thing they tend to do - uncanny valley of 'sky is blue' type product descriptive copy that reminds me of dribbble shots or landing page template demos from a few years ago. Technically correct language that doesn't communicate much emotionally.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoThis is basically what Windsurf is doing right [0]? Ultimately all this UI stuff is just window dressing on top of agents. [0] https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-2-0 https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-2-0
- vitriapp 5mo agoIs windsurf open source?
- aavci 5mo agoI don’t see a problem here. Do you? Also, Linear themselves are also working on this.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoI never said there was a problem.
- gbro3n 5mo agoThere's a few apps out there that facilitate handing off to agents from kanban boards. I needed something more 'human in the loop', handing off to an agent without good visibility of the change set and opportunity to steer doesn't work for me. https://www.agentkanban.io https://www.agentkanban.io links a taskboard with github copilot chat in vs code via our extension so we have the benefit of task management and context capture from the chat to the tasks. This gives us all the features of a top harness (vs code) and the task / project management features at the same time.
- rigonkulous 5mo ago>There's a few apps out there that facilitate handing off to agents from kanban boards. jira-cli and hermes, for example. in fact, wiring hermes up to an existing Jira(/other_PM_system) is, well .. fruitful.
- rapiz 5mo agofyi https://github.com/multica-ai/multica https://github.com/multica-ai/multica
- chrisweekly 5mo ago> "Local-first, zero servers. Everything lives in .kanbots/ next to your repo: SQLite database, configs, worktrees. No cloud account, no telemetry, no HTTP server. This is the open-source desktop edition." This is table-stakes for me to consider adoption of a tool like this.
- Brainspackle 5mo agowhat is a table-stake?
- idle_zealot 5mo agoThe minimum required payment to play a gambling game, where the money up for grabs is called "stake". See also "raising the stakes". In context it means the minimum feature set to be considered for adoption.
- davedigerati 5mo agovery nice response idle_zealot, it's this level of human decency in comments that keeps me coming back to HN
- iyn 5mo agosame — that was an unexpected little moment on HN. Honestly appreciated the answer as it caused me to stop and examine the phrase I've been using/hearing without never really thinking about it.
- kesor 5mo ago[flagged]
- port11 5mo agoThis is incendiary and unkind, violating the first rule about comments. Table-stakes is a perfectly reasonable expression. Would you say that <word> is a way for Nigerians to sound smart?
- KaiShips 5mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- block_dagger 5mo agoTo the website maintainers: https://www.kanbots.dev/comparisons https://www.kanbots.dev/comparisons returns a 404
- KronisLV 5mo agoCline was also working on something like this: https://github.com/cline/kanban https://github.com/cline/kanban
- wahnfrieden 5mo agohttps://github.com/openai/symphony https://github.com/openai/symphony
- draculero 5mo agoI thought it was the same product. Have any of you used either of them?
- KronisLV 5mo agoGave it a brief shot, felt a bit early on, went back to Claude. I feel like the Kanban board that would do it best would just allow easily bringing up Claude Code sessions with all user input etc.
- sinandrei 5mo agoCould this be something running of our a Github kanban board?
- rigonkulous 5mo agoYes, this is like, the best thing ever .. I've generally been doing this, albeit with command-line Jira and a "my workflow is my prompt" philosophy, resulting in a fleet of little kanbans .. and my agents are really, really doing well. They never sleep, eat, etc. But .. you know something cute? AI makes using Jira fun, again.
- speedgoose 5mo agoI have got more frustrations than successes when I tried to run agents without supervising them. I believe the technology will get there eventually, but right now I need one IDE per agent and its cumbersome to merge the work.
- jms703 5mo agoSame. I end up needing agents to clean up after agents.
- Guillaume86 5mo agoTangential question for Claude Code subscribers, mid June `claude -p` will move to api pricing (with some "SDK credits" before it kicks in), so headless usage will become 20-30 times more expensive, and all these high level orchestrator tools/workflows depend on it. What the next move for you? How does the OpenAI subscriptions compare? Similar limitations?
- meagher 5mo agobig opportunity to buy kan.bot
- aitchnyu 5mo agoI keep wondering how people accept a nights worth of agent activity. I feel 30 minutes of planning and 30 minutes of implementation in my solo side project's repo is too big to review. At minute 5, I may ask the AI to redo stuff even as its spitting out code.
- fphilipe 5mo agoI wonder the same. The answer I usually get from people who do manage is that they don't look at the code – or at least not in detail. Personally, I always end up tweaking something the agent produced. I wonder if I should let go of that control...
- debabrata_saha 5mo agoyeah
- InsideOutSanta 5mo agoEven the newest models, like GPT 5.5, only deliver what I want nine out of ten times. If I didn't catch the remaining 10% of misguided garbage by manually reviewing every change, it would add up really quickly.
- stavros 5mo agoI never look at code. It used to be that it quickly became unmaintainable spaghetti where the agent struggled to make any change at all, but in the past year (and with a three step plan/develop/review workflow), the quality is so good that I basically just don't look at the code any more. It definitely has fewer bugs than a senior developer, but it really hinges on getting the plan right. 20 minutes of planning and 20 of implementation sounds about right for my workflow as well, just make sure you have GPT as a reviewer. It's very nitpicky and finds lots of bugs.
- materielle 5mo agoThis brings to mind two thoughts: First, that this is challenging to scale across large orgs. Even if your plans produce high quality code, that isn’t true for everyone. I’m definitely struggling with slop code being collectively mailed to me for review my our 1,000 engineers that were told to use their AI subscription all at once. I feel like we should be taking “prompt engineering” more seriously. And when people mail me code to review, it should also include the agentic workflow and plan. So that when code isn’t up to quality, and can have a discussion about the prompts used to generate it. My second thought is related to your senior engineer comment. This isn’t surprising, because in most engineering orgs, seniority is completely unrelated to code quality. In fact, many orgs incentive the opposite: “senior” devs that push out buggy code quickly and push accountability downhill to the junior devs.
- jorl17 5mo agoPersonally, this is somewhat close to what I want. I want to have a fullblown cursor instance/window for each task I have, and a central Hub that manages spawning those instances, setting up the worktrees, etc. Cursor seems to pretty much have all the available tools there already (it can already spawn agents to their own worktrees with proper setup scripts, for example). I don't get why they don't do it and instead insist on a buggy and confusing agents experience. Unfortunately, most attempts at this seem to assume I want a model where "1 task = 1 agent = 1 chat", whereas what I really want is "1 task = 1 worktree = 1 full IDE around it". With the full IDE I can have multiple agents/conversations, review code thoroughly and also chip in once in a while. I can have multiple models (that I pick) in multiple chats, iterate forwards, backwards, you name it. I really don't understand why there seems to be this idea that "parallel agents" should live in their own little restricted flow that's limited to a tiny chat interface. I want the full flow for every agent! I was hoping cursor would do this, but they really seem to be going the direction of turning their absolutely terrible web agents UI (where you can't even CHANGE THE MODEL!!!!) into a desktop thing. Sad, as I've been an Ultra paying customer and might have to leave soon with the direction they're heading.
- 2001zhaozhao 5mo ago> I want to have a fullblown cursor instance/window for each task I have, and a central Hub that manages spawning those instances, setting up the worktrees, etc. I am working on exactly this interface for my new tool called Kotkit. You start with kanban board management of workspaces. Each workspace (worktree on one/multiple repos) is a feature-rich IDE interface in a remote-capable in-browser desktop. You can spawn multiple agents with a good UI wrapper and full auditable logs, solve worktree rebase/merge with 1-click AI features, and there is also an embedded VSCode to solve edge cases. It also supports very deep plugin integration like IntelliJ. Currently dogfooding it on my own projects and will be released sometime soon.
- gavmor 5mo agoThat's sorta how Agent of Empires and also Zed seem to operate—worktrees as a first class aspect of the workflow.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ptengelmann 5mo agoone of your pages return 404 /comparison... but cool project! I guess we're just still not there to let agents run without supervision. At least for me.
- KerrickStaley 5mo agoThis reminds me of Vibe Kanban (https://vibekanban.com/ https://vibekanban.com/) which I use to manage coding agents on most of my projects. The Vibe Kanban developers unfortunately decided that they didn't see a path to profitability and have stopped investing in the project. It's open source and so you can run it locally / fork it, but it has stopped improving and there are still annoying bugs that need to be fixed (and I don't have time to maintain it personally). This makes me sad because I would be willing to pay for Vibe Kanban, but I didn't need the features their paid plan offered (in retrospect maybe I should have paid anyway). I'll give Kanbots a go :) I'd recommend liberally copying features from Vibe Kanban. In particular the remote support and "Open in VS Code" button (which in my case opens a local VSCode client pointing to a remote VSCode server) are critical for me.
- 2001zhaozhao 5mo agoVibe Kanban is indeed a treasure trove in terms of useful features. I've been working for the last week or two on getting my new tool up to parity with VK with additional improvements. I've been posting some screenshots into the Vibe Kanban discord as well. Hopefully it'll be a great fit for your use case when I finally am ready to launch it. (My tool aims for better features than VK in both the Kanban board and agent workspaces, while adding extra systems like desktop windowing, plugins, in-browser VSCode integration, and htmx-like server-rendered UI. The remote access also works differently - you host the whole thing like OpenClaw and access the remote desktop UI from the browser, rather than run a webserver on your laptop to access remote coding agents.)
- yoavsha1 5mo agoDid you publish your tool? I searched through your GitHub but couldn't find it. Sounds amazing, I was thinking of a similar concept.
- croes 5mo agoCan‘t you use Vibe Kanban to vibe code fixes?
- 2001zhaozhao 5mo agoLooks very nice! Just a heads up, the website is extremely choppy on WebKit (Orion Browser) for me when scrolling edit: not working with Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock, it needs a claude scription
- m_m_carvalho 5mo agoThe parallel agents concept is interesting. How does it handle state sync between agents when they're modifying the same board? Or is there built-in conflict resolution?
- timfsu 5mo agoThis is dope! We basically built something very similar internally for our team and it's been a very natural and intuitive way to manage agents (as opposed to having a bunch of terminals to track). Not every task/conversation can be done in the background, so it's been helpful for us internally to be able to seamlessly transition between "interactive conversation" and "background job done by agents" even within a single card.
- teaearlgraycold 5mo agoThe kanban board on the landing page looks terrible on mobile (iPhone 15 Pro).
- tquinn35 5mo agoIsn’t this just vibe kanban? https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban
- darkstar999 5mo agoCompetitors can exist.
- rglover 5mo agoThe way I've explained it: "there's 8 billion other monkeys on this rock dude, of course someone else is doing the same thing."
- weitendorf 5mo agoDude it's literally on bloop. It's a bloop original
- tquinn35 5mo agoNot sure what your trying to say here
- encoderer 5mo agoIs the website done with Claude design? It gave me a very similar theme recently.
- zyngaro 5mo agoHow does it handle dependent cards ? And the spare the they should be blah blah
- jaequery 5mo agoi was also building something similar. https://github.com/jaequery/planbooq https://github.com/jaequery/planbooq. i think building your own kanban is the new age vim/emacs, so you can streamline your workflows the way you want them to be.
- yurukusa 5mo ago[flagged]
- AgentMasterRace 5mo agoCline has this too
- atoav 5mo agoThe problem with this is that agents need to have good taste (code, design and UX) hammered into them with a crowbar and eben then writing manual CSS is something I find myself doing
- aliasxneo 5mo ago> “kanbots” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash. What a fitting first error to run into for vibe coded software.
- recroad 5mo agoThere's also this: https://www.stridelikeaboss.com/ https://www.stridelikeaboss.com/
- wotsdat 5mo ago[dead]
- desireco42 5mo agoLanding page looks cool and I would love to try it out, but to make a cloud account just to work locally is not OK for me.
- claudiug 5mo agohttps://www.kanbots.dev/comparisons https://www.kanbots.dev/comparisons fantastic list!
- ernsheong 5mo agohmm 404 for me
- offercc 5mo ago[flagged]
- nullbio 5mo agoOne thing I don't understand with all of these, is how they're handling different worktree infrastructure spin-up? For example, if I have a webapp, I want each of the worktrees to spin up its own infrastructure, and be accessible on its own unique local url, so that I can see the changes locally for each worktree, or I can have agents automate visual checks using something like agent-browser. Currently I use docker for my infrastructure, each service running in its own container. I have a script that has a ./app worktree create worktreename. That creates a worktree as "worktreename" and spins up all of my docker infrastructure with prefixes for things like "WORKTREENAME", and I can access all my urls at worktreename.myapp.test (or just myapp.test for the main worktree). This is working fine for now, but it'd be cool if one of these apps was compatible with this concept so I could move over to that.
- bhu8 5mo agoJust use direnv? You’ll probably need to adjust the port you are hosting the local page on, but that’s just N=mod(hash based on the worktree name) and then port=default_port+N. Tell your claude to set this up. Should do it in a single prompt
- chrisvenum 5mo agoI have this issue at work, I asked CC to create a very simple bun CLI tool that can be hard to create, destroy and list worktrees. The CLI seeds the .env file with a url, db for that worktree and I use Vercels open source package portless to spin up a dev server with unique ports so I get a url per worktree
- laurels-marts 5mo agoi have shell scripts that create/tear down worktrees. the shell script finds unique unused ports across all existing worktrees and assigns in local .env upon worktree creation. when the worktree gets merged and is torn down the ports get released. secrets that are not worktree-specific i don't keep in local .env i inject via shell. honestly creating these local scripts for automating the dev work was trivial and they combine well with all other cli tooling. thats why i havent tried any of the GUI apps yet. im not sure they're able to compete with my custom local setup that works exactly the way i want.
- kesor 5mo agoOriginally the word "Kanban" was used by Toyota to describe their card system that helped them achieve several important things, one of them was to NOT work on too many things at once. The other one was to visualize the work. And in general Kanban was used to manage the flow of work so that defects don't get through. This tool on the other hand is all about "jam as much work as you can come up with into being created in parallel". Obviously there is no managing of any flow of quality outputs, and no limiting of any work because you just shove everything into the agent and burn tokens like crazy. Calling this a "Kanban" really irks me ... its like blasphemy or something.
- npodbielski 5mo ago> play nice with tools you already use: codex, Claude, cusrsor, github, sqlite, electron I do not use any of those. Also why all of those vibe coded websites are so slow on mobile. Also I do not understand why Software Developer people are work so hard to make themselves obsolete. Why? You guys do not enjoy eating and having place to sleep?
- JJOKOCHAA 5mo ago[dead]
- okandship 5mo agoi like the board-as-orchestrator idea, but the hard part seems less "run more agents" and more making review/load visible enough that wip stays bounded
- arikrahman 5mo agoHow does this compare with https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban?
- zane_shu 5mo ago[flagged]
- Ozzie-D 5mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- marat_yv 5mo agoUI looks like not a huge amount of taste and effort. Maybe smth nice looking could distinguish it from the competitors. Cool thing though
- aqme28 5mo agoHa, I built the exact same thing, except using ClickUp for all the task management. Having agents on kanban is really a level-up in terms of what you can do and how you can organize.
- alex_x 5mo agoseeing this slop landings is so tiring. It makes me not caring about potentially good product in no time
- ofcrpls 5mo agohttps://github.com/AndyMik90/Aperant https://github.com/AndyMik90/Aperant did this during the peak of the macmini auto claude phase but last update was 5 months ago
- manu017 5mo ago[flagged]
- ryanshrott 5mo ago[flagged]
- croes 5mo agoMac OS UI on windows
- flexagoon 5mo agoThe mobile website is completely broken
- JJOKOCHAA 5mo ago[dead]
- JJOKOCHAA 5mo ago[dead]