What is Agentic Kanban?

Agentic Kanban is a VS Code extension that gives you and a coding agent a shared Kanban board. Tasks live as Markdown files your team can read, edit, and review in Git — no opaque database, no context drift between sessions.

Pick a profile that fits your work style:

• Lite — backlog → in-progress → done. Fast path for bug fixes and small changes.
• Standard — backlog → planning → in-progress → review → done. Full spec-driven delivery with plan approval and implementation review.

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What you actually get

A visual board — cards you can drag between lanes, with priority, labels, and dependency indicators visible at a glance.

@kanban chat commands — create tasks, attach specs, create worktrees, run diagnostics, and drive lane sweeps from the VS Code Chat panel.

Spec artifacts per task — /spec auth scaffolds proposal.md, design.md, tasks.md, and a shared capability spec under .agentkanban/changes/. The agent works from these files, not from stale chat memory.

Loop-until-dry automation — /loop repeatedly advances ready tasks through lanes until the lane is dry. Dependency-aware: task B stays parked until task A reaches done.

Persistent context — a managed section in AGENTS.md and .agentkanban/INSTRUCTION.md keep the workflow rules and active task visible to any agent on every turn.

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Core Principles

1. Markdown as Source of Truth

Every card on the board is a Markdown file under .agentkanban/tasks/. Example:

---
title: Add OAuth2 login
lane: planning
priority: high
labels:
  - backend
dependsOn:
  - establish-auth-storage
change: .agentkanban/changes/add-oauth2-login
---

## Conversation

### user
Plan the OAuth2 implementation.

### agent
Starting with auth boundary mapping...

The board reads these files to render columns. Any card move on the board modifies the lane: in frontmatter. This makes your workflow fully auditable and Git-trackable.

2. Fixed Lane Delivery

A task always sits in a known lane. Lanes are fixed per profile — agents cannot invent new lane names or skip steps:

• Lite: backlog → in-progress → done
• Standard: backlog → planning → in-progress → review → done

This keeps the workflow coherent across long agent sessions where chat context has long since rolled off.

3. Two Human Gates, No More

The extension enforces exactly two human checkpoints in Standard profile:

• Plan Approval: moving a task from planning to in-progress is your sign-off that the plan is ready.
• Completion Gate: moving from review to done is your sign-off that the implementation is accepted.

Everything in between (implementing, verifying, checking off tasks.md) the agent handles autonomously. /loop is specifically designed to refuse crossing either gate — it will park tasks that would need a human decision rather than skipping ahead.

4. Dependency-Aware Lane Loop

Tasks declare dependencies in frontmatter:

dependsOn:
  - establish-auth-storage
labels:
  - blocked-by:establish-auth-storage

When you run @kanban /loop, it checks each task’s dependsOn list. A task is only ready when every dependency is in done. Independent tasks can be processed in parallel; dependent chains stay strictly ordered. The loop runs multiple passes until nothing more can advance.