Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

Most of the narrative is about how AI is writing all/most code, but I’d wager that the fraction of human reviewed code is approaching zero far faster than anyone is realizing or willing to admit.

A lot of that agent activity is combing over what was previously made, forcing constraints upon it so you have a reasonable expectation of what ends up on your desk for review.

For me, strong file structure helps as well. Reviewing a 3,000 line file it just created is abysmal. I wouldn't accept that from human nor machine :) Multiple files in the right places helps reduce cognitive load.

Sometimes I'll also review with the agent interactively. What is the most important file to review first, etc?

I like to stage changes into a "LGTM" pile. Then if I want changes, I'll have the agent "review unstaged changes - I want something different done here."

I 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...

No one is reviewing the code. Managers don't want us to review code either. It's a bottleneck. If something goes wrong (bugs) they are fixed as they come. It's a very sad era of software engineering. If there ever was some engineering in our trade, now it's mostly gone. We are guessing around, writing "skills" files with "please, do not introduce bugs" or "you are an owner, not a renter" or similar stuff. It's just very low effort, very undeterministic. Big apps out there are going down constantly because of AI slop (e.g., Github), and we are seeing it more often as well in non-so popular systems (e.g., in my company and other saas that we use).

Product managers never cared about the code. Engineering managers don't care about code as much as they did when they were engineers. Directors couldn't care less about code. CTOs don't know what code looks like anymore. We are at the end of the chain, and somehow we always took pride of well written and maintainble code because we knew deep inside that good systems are built based on good code. But now we are jeopardizing ourselves, it's us the engineers who don't care anymore about code and with AI that problems is amplified.

I usually aim to have Claude end up with about 500 lines of code after a night of work. Most of what it's doing is experimenting with many different approaches, summarizing them, and then giving me a relatively small diff to review and modify.

So I've been in a hobby project for a few weeks -- transforming an old software modem binary to c code.

I gave it the existing modem, and had it build rigging to build test vectors. I had it specify the work in the modem. And to confirm that legacy<>legacy produced the same streams as the new code. I've also recorded test vectors vs. other modems.

I've since launched it on targeted refactoring and code reduction projects.

I am mostly not looking at the code. There's a 100KSLOC lump of code that is much cleaner than a decompilation but a fair bit dirtier than what I would write myself. It is not factored terribly. I have some hope of getting it to trim this down to 70KSLOC that then I can accept in small blocks.

It outperforms the original softmodem, hitting higher RX rates for the same line quality and using less CPU. It also has additional functionality.

So, you know, I would never have written something this large for a hobby myself. And it's cost me $200 and 20-30 minutes per day for a few weeks to get a huge functional surface that I do believe I will be able to trust at the end of the process.

That depends. When I'm working on a 1 in a million race condition in some multi-threaded code, the agent needs hours to figure out what is going on. (I would probably need weeks - I don't know as I've given up on some of these before I could point an agent at it)

They don’t, they just have Claude commit and push straight to the main branch. Just like the author of this 100% slop app: https://github.com/leodavinci1/kanbots/commits/main/

They most likely don’t review it ;)

Lots of people are working on repetitive simple projects like the Nth website whatever or things like that, boring stuff. This LLM era is already a very big deal for these people.

Personally somehow I am working on stuff that has like 25% not trivial stuff and that is enough to have the same experience as you have.

But also lots of people just don't care about quality and they might be right with their customers/audience. In these cases when someone catches one, an agent is going to iterate on it and make it (seemingly) go away, bandage applied, who cares again. This has a market, I am sure. Lots of programmer folks are just as bad.

Yes it is too big to review for you - the human - so you simply don't review code anymore. Isn't that difficult to comprehend, is it?

Vibe 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.)

What is ”a tool like this”?

If AI is agentic I would expect it takes an hour of chatting for any PM to integrate some agent Ralph loop with Jira. Jira or Trello or Linear or Basecamp all have APIs and I guess CLIs any agent can use to talk to them. No developer or SaaS should be needed to make them understand tasks are checked out when you start work and contain instructions and when you are done you move the ticket to DONE.

what is a table-stake?

Competitors can exist.

There'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 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.

I don’t see a problem here. Do you?

Also, Linear themselves are also working on this.

Is windsurf open source?

Nice 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.

You should check out Stripe's dev blog about minions. Seems directionally similar.

I thought it was the same product. Have any of you used either of them?

arent they sticking to their own cards?

> 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.

This is the only one I can tell that easily works with local modals through hermes or pi.

I'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/ (and the repo is at https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit)

These 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.

It looks like a kanban interface to agent orchestration.