Show HN: Vibe Kanban – Kanban board to manage your AI coding agents

That's fair feedback, I have a PR with a very clear opt-in here https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/pull/146

I will leave this open for comments for the next hour and then merge.

Thanks, really appreciate the heads up. I put devs who do this on a personal black list for life.

I think also that this would be better as an mcp tool / resource. Let the model operate and query it as needed.

could you point me to what jurisdictions require analytics opt in esp for open source devtools? thats not actually something ive seen as a legal requirement, more a community preference.

eg ok we all know about EU website cookie banners, but i am more ignorant about devtools/clis sending back telemetry. any actual laws cited here would update me significatnly

analytics stuff is fine but the email harvesting/github username appears to be illegal especially if its done without notifying the user?

great catch, many open source projects appear to be just an elaborate lead gen tool these days.

fork, task claude to remove all github dependence, build.

Completely agree!

You can actually use a coding agent to create tickets from within Vibe Kanban. Add the Vibe Kanban MCP server (from MCP settings) and ask the agent to plan a task and write tickets.

c.f. "Surgical Team" in 'The Mythical Man-Month' by Fred Brooks. That book is perennially relevant.

Yeah I think giving the option to move execution to the cloud makes a lot of sense, I already find my macbook slowing down after 4 concurrent runs, mainly rustc.

Also now we're pushing many more PRs think we defo need better ways to stack and review work. Will look into this asap

Very productive increase sirs! Whole team well promoted.

No, if we can review 10 PRs a day and AI writes one of them, we now have to review 11 PRs

> AI coding agents are increasingly writing the world's code and human engineers now spend the majority of their time planning, reviewing, and orchestrating tasks.

This tactic is called "assuming the sale". ie, Make a statement as-if it is already true, and put the burden on the reader to negate it. Majority of us are too scared of what others think, and go-along by default. It is related to the FOMO tactic in that it could be used in conjunction with it to make it a double-whammy. for example, the statement above could have ended with: "and everyone is now using agents to increase their productivity, and if you arent using it, you are left behind"

Glad you stood up to challenge it.

> human engineers now spend the majority of their time planning, reviewing, and orchestrating tasks

> > This feel like much too broad a statement to be true.

This is just what they wish to be true.

I wonder how demographics (specifically age) tie into this. I'm well into my 30s and I found that statement absurd, but perhaps it is basically universally true among recent grads.

I wouldn't say it's the majority of my time but the most utility I've got out of AI is using MCP to deal with the boring shit: update my jira tickets to in progress/in review, read feedback on a PR and address the trivial shit, check the CI pipeline and make it pass if it failed, and write commits in a consistent, descriptive way.

It's a lot more hands on when you try to write code with it, which I still try out, but it's only because I know exactly what the solution is and I'm just walking the agent towards it and improving how I write my prompts. It's slower than doing it myself in many cases.

I read that too and these are the kind of statements which really tells you what happens when a profession embraces mediocrity and accepts something as crass as "Vibe-coding" which is somehow going to change "software engineering" even when adding so-called "AI agents" - which makes it worse.

All this cargo-culting is done without realizing that more code means more security issues, technical debt, more time for humans to review the mess and *especially* more testing.

Once again, Vibe-coding is not software engineering.

i feel so strongly that this will rapidly become true over the next 6 months. if you don't believe me check out Sean Grove's talk from mid June - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rABwKRsec4

Interesting, hadn't heard of that. Would better GitLab support be useful in Vibe Kanban?

> Maybe it's my fault, but i tried every single coding agent with a variety of similar tools and whenever i try to parallelize, they clash while editing files simultaneously, i lose mental context of what's going on, they rewrite tests etc.

Fwiw Claude suggests using different git workspaces for your agents. This would entirely solve the clashing, though they may still conflict and need normal git conflict resolves of course.

Theoretically that would work fine, as it would be just like two people working on different branches/repos/etc.

I've not tried that though. AI generates way too much code for me to review as it is, several subtasks working concurrently would be overwhelming for me.

This is a bet on a future where code is increasingly written by AI and we as human engineers need the best tools to review that work, catch issues and uphold quality.

It is not just chaos, it is an unwanted product. Don't misunderstand - people would love this product if it works. But AI cannot do this yet. Products like this are built on an assumption that AI has matured enough to actually succeed at all tasks. But that simply isn't true. Vibe coding is still slop.

AI needs to do every single step of this type of flow to an acceptable quality level, with high standards on that definition of "acceptable", and then you could bring all the workflow together. But doing the workflow first and assuming quality will catch up later is just asking for a pile of rejections when you try to sell it.

I'm not just making this up, either... I've seen and talked to numerous people over the last couple years who all came up with similar ideas. Some even did have workable prototypes running. And they had sales from the mom/friends/family connections, but when they tried to get "real" sales, they hit walls.

I would assume because it was vibe coded.

Because it's not "a kanban board"? It's a coding agent orchestrator that's made in the shape of a Kanban board.

You might be right that this app asks for excessively broad privileges, but your case would be much stronger if it wasn't backed by an absurdly disingenuous argument.

How is the isolation layer of a shadow vcs different/better than just checking into a feature branch and not pushing?

Not saying there isn't value in the risk assessment part, but, I'm asking specifically about the change isolation.

Are you sure you're using vibe-kanban? The project spins up a worktree for each task attempt specifically to solve this problem.

Cheers! Smaller teams, more infrastructure, more testing, tasks requiring review in minutes not days - the features are just totally different for the new world than what legacy PM tools are optimised for, and who they have to continue to serve.

Maybe Tony can inspire you?

( ◠ ‿ ・ ) —

https://youtube.com/shorts/YBAcvRV7VSM?si=jp2hZvFIVo-vSdu6

Very much a bet that things are going to get much much better very quickly

Hi. I’m the author of backlog.md . Your team did a great job on Vibe Kanban. It looks great and has a cool name. I like to see more tools trying to solve the human-ai agent interaction for building projects.

I wish you all the best with this tool!

Hi, co-author of this project here!

In Vibe Kanban you can directly interact with Claude Code from within the Kanban board. E.g. you can write out a ticket, hit a button to run it locally with Claude Code/Gemini etc., watch its responses, and then review any diffs that it generated.

Yes I generally cherry pick the easier 50% of my backlog and work on those with Vibe Kanban, and the other 50% is still manual or happens with coding agent but with a human-in-the-loop.

This is a bet that coding agents will continue to get better, and this feels like the right time to try and figure out the interface.

I would say conservatively that 80% of Vibe Kanban has been built by Amp

I could see there being a long term free offering that doesn't cost us compute or tokens, and probably some other offerings that actually do use resources and would make sense to build a business around.

But that's not a today problem, we just want to absorb feedback and iterate until we build the ultimate tool for working with these coding agents.

"11 days ago" this feels like a year ago :O

Good point - there are a few random ones already but I will ask a coding agent to implement this comprehensively

I don't think smart ones are that fast. They can work for hours if you have the budget.

Currently - claude code is pretty slow. I've definitely had it take >15 minutes on the (faster than opus!) sonnet model just thinking and writing code without feedback or running long lasting tools. I expect this to change given that companies like cerebras exist and seem to know how to generate tokens in much less time, but the current state of the art is what it is.

Always - if you're going to pipe the result of some slow process back to them (like building a giant C++ project that takes minutes/hours, or running a huge set of tests...)... it's going to be slow.

For me, the average task takes a coding agent 2-5 minutes to complete. A slightly annoying amount of time as I'm prone to getting distracted while I wait.

This gives me something to do in that time.

My guess is time to complete a task will oscillate - going up as we give agents more complex tasks to work on, and going down with LLM performance improvement.

Kanban seems like a good starting place, but I broadly agree that the interface for human<>agent collaboration will need to be different from the default interface we have today with legacy PM tools.

Things move across the board so quickly when AI is doing the work that ~50% of the columns seem pretty redundant.

Nostalgia!

Let me know if any issues, we're turning feedback around pretty quick

It can open GitHub PRs from the interface and there's tons more info we want to pull in like the result of CI checks

Great ChatGPT question XD

AI was already giving you 100x so we're up to 1000x

We have this! Vibe Kanban includes its own MCP server that you can use to create tickets within the Kanban board.

Click on the MCP Servers tab, then hit "Add Vibe Kanban MCP". Then create and start a "planning" ticket like "Plan a migration from AWS to Azure and create detailed tickets for each step along the way". Sit back and watch the cards roll in!

Will do more to document this better soon :)

It says in the linked readme to not open pull requests without discussing it first.