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

195 points by louiskw 1y ago

Hey HN! I'm Louis, one of the creators of Vibe Kanban. We started working on this a few weeks ago. Personally, I was feeling pretty useless working synchronously with coding agents. The 2-5 minutes that they take to complete their work often led me to distraction and doomscrolling. But there's plenty of productive work that we (human engineers) could be doing in that time, especially if we run coding agents in the background and parallelise them. Vibe Kanban lets you effortlessly spin up multiple coding agents. While some agents handle tasks in the background, you can focus on planning future work or reviewing completed tasks. After a few weeks of internal dog fooding and sharing it with friends, we've now open-sourced Vibe Kanban, and it's stable enough for day-to-day use. I'd love to hear your feedback, feel free to open an issue on the github and we'll respond ASAP.

lharries 1y ago
I used this last week and it's excellent - feels like the same increase in productivity increase from when I first used Cursor. Are you thinking of doing a hosted version so I can have my team collab on it? And I found I could open lots of PRs at once but they often need to be dependent on each other - and then I want to make a change to the first one. How are you thinking of better managing that flow?
- louiskw 1y ago
  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
- hddbbdbfnfdk 1y ago
  Very productive increase sirs! Whole team well promoted.
slig 1y ago
How does this compare with Backlog.md? [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483530
- ggordonhall 1y ago
  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.
  - slig 1y ago
    Thank you! I was taking a look at the docs, and I'm going to play with it later today. Thanks for sharing and congrats on shipping!
- mrlesk 1y ago
  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!
randysalami 1y ago
I tried to build something similar but in a peer-to-peer fashion and for humans + AI. It was supposed to be like a Kanban board that could scale to any team size and use Planning AI to ingest/match/monitor work realtime across teams and agents. I ran out of steam and couldn’t get funding but here is the prototype version: https://postwork-alpha.vercel.app/ https://postwork-alpha.vercel.app/ User: maryann.biaggioli@astarconsulting.com Pass: Test1234! I never got to a point where I actually integrated AI agents (weren’t as good at the time) but it’s cool to see it working in the real world!
swalsh 1y ago
I built something similar for my own workflow. Works okay. The hard part is as you scale, you end up with compounded false affirmatives. Model adds some fallback mechanism that makes it work, tests pass, etc. The nice part is you can ask models to review the code from others, call out fallbacks, hard coding, stuff like that. It does a good job at identifying buried bodies. But if you dig up a buried body, I'd manually confirm it was properly disposed of as the models usually hid the body in the first place because they needed some input they didn't have, got confused or ran into an issue.
deepdarkforest 1y ago
This is a launch by a YC company that converts enterprise cobol code into java. 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. It's chaos. Thats fine if you are vibe coding an unimportant nextjs/vercel demo, but i'm really sceptical of all this stance that you should be proud of how abstracted you are from code. A kanban board to just shoot off as many tasks as possible and just quickly read over the PR's is crazy to me. If you want to appear a serious company that should be allowed to write enterprise code, imo this path is so risky. I see this in quite a few podcasts, tweets etc. People bragging how abstracted they are from their own product anymore. Again, maybe i am missing something, but all of this github copilot/just reviewing like 10 coding agents PR's just introduces so much noise and slop. Is it really what you want your image to be as a code company?
- unshavedyak 1y ago
  > 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.
  - helsinki 1y ago
    This works in theory and somewhat in practice but it is not as clean as people make it seem, as someone who has spent tens of thousands on Opus tokens and worktrees - it’s just not that great. It works, but it’s just, ugh, boring, super tedious, etc. at the end of it all, you’re still sitting around waiting for Claude to merge conflicts.
- louiskw 1y ago
skeptrune 1y ago
I remember the original Bloop search engine! Some kind of UI or management system like this seems like it would be high level useful. Will have to give it a run.
- louiskw 1y ago
  Nostalgia! Let me know if any issues, we're turning feedback around pretty quick
shibeprime 1y ago
Now we just let a CTO agent create the cards, review, and merge the PRs?
- ggordonhall 1y ago
  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 :)
_jayhack_ 1y ago
Very cool and interesting project. Ideas like this are a threat to traditionally-conceived project management platforms like Linear; that being said, Linear and others (Monday, ClickUp, etc.) are pushing aggressively into UX built for human/AI collaboration. I guess the question is how quickly they can execute and how many novel features are required to properly bring AI into the human project workspace
- louiskw 1y ago
  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.
oc1 1y ago
We need something like a kitchen brigade in software - one who writes the vibe code tickets (Chef de Vibe), one who reviews the vibe code (Sous-Vibe), one who oversees the agents and restarts them if they get hung up (Agent de Station). We could theoretically smash thousand tickets a day with this principle
- ggordonhall 1y ago
  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.
- atavistically 1y ago
  c.f. "Surgical Team" in 'The Mythical Man-Month' by Fred Brooks. That book is perennially relevant.
csomar 1y ago
Why does this need GitHub auth? This asks for unlimited private access to ones repo. This is a hard NO from me.
- louiskw 1y ago
  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
  - csomar 1y ago
    Then you should have gone with a GitHub App instead of an Oauth App. The difference is that a GitHub App allows granularity of selection.
bpshaver 1y ago
> Get 10x more out of... So you're saying it goes up to 11x?
- louiskw 1y ago
  Great ChatGPT question XD
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  AI was already giving you 100x so we're up to 1000x
remram 1y ago
Why do you need to "manage" your coding agents like they are people? How long does it take them to do a task once prompted, in the background? Don't you just prompt an immediately review the result?
- scotty79 1y ago
  I don't think smart ones are that fast. They can work for hours if you have the budget.
  - remram 1y ago
    Interesting, I didn't know that.
- louiskw 1y ago
  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.
- gpm 1y ago
  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.
swyx 1y ago
Louis did a long form chat and vibe coded extra features in our discord meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCksand7Iwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCksand7Iwo for more info on this
- louiskw 1y ago
  "11 days ago" this feels like a year ago :O
doritosfan84 1y ago
The permissions this asks for feel kinda insane to me. Why does a kanban board need to see the code or my deploy keys among other things?
- jeltz 1y ago
  I would assume because it was vibe coded.
  - gpm 1y ago
    More generously I'd assume because - It's an early prototype so they haven't dealt with fine grained permissions - They really do want to do things like access private repos with it themselves - They really do want the ability to do things like checkout code, create PRs, etc... and that involves a lot of permission.
    - skeeter2020 1y ago
      every one of your "more generous" assumptions is the opposite of what should be their process. It's the equivalent of "vacuum up as much data as possible and then decide what to do with it". Not acceptable.
      - gpm 1y ago
        It's "vacuuming" that data in the sense of giving API access to a tool that runs on your local computer, that seems acceptable enough for me in the early stages of developing a tool. The other privacy complains I have regarding them harvesting usernames and email addresses... not so much.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  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.
barbazoo 1y ago
> 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.
- bwfan123 1y ago
  > 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.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    I'll add - often not adding the last part is even MORE powerful: "and everyone is now using agents to increase their productivity..."
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- ljm 1y ago
  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.
deleted 1y ago
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amirhirsch 1y ago
great. now i have to spend my morning using vibe kanban to make a tui for vibe kanban with textual. i'll submit a pr as soon as it's finished.
- Jolter 1y ago
  It says in the linked readme to not open pull requests without discussing it first.
peadarohaodha 1y ago
Would love to have a good selection of keyboard shortcuts! Power Vibe Kanban
- louiskw 1y ago
  Good point - there are a few random ones already but I will ask a coding agent to implement this comprehensively
lowdownbutter 1y ago
[flagged]
diggan 1y ago
That's an interesting idea and looks neat! I have my own developed agent running locally in containers, and currently use GitHub issues+pull requests for coordinating all the asynchronous work. Do you have any pointers on the approach I should take if I basically have something like a service already running for this, and I just want to hook up your UI to use it instead? Just some broad pointers on what would be required would be most helpful already!
gpm 1y ago
I definitely don't feel like the models are reliable enough that I'd be more productive running them in parallel like this yet, but I can see a future where I want this. Their reliability probably varies a lot depending on what you are using them for - so maybe I'm just using them in more difficult (for claude) domains.
- louiskw 1y ago
  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.
FailMore 1y ago
Do you think you will keep it free or can you see a business model developing around it? If so, what do you think it would be? / How would you split paid tiers vs free users? Not a big deal to me...!! But I'm curious how one might commercialise these types of free/open source projects
- louiskw 1y ago
  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.
MH15 1y ago
Can you use this with the Claude Code Github Action?
gpm 1y ago
Hmm, analytics appear to default to enabled: https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59ab97d714cf921714611b7e38/backend/src/models/config.rs#L166C13-L166C30 https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59... It is harvesting email addresses and github usernames: https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59ab97d714cf921714611b7e38/backend/src/routes/auth.rs#L234 https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59... Then it seems to track every time you start/finish/merge/attempt a task, and every time you run a dev server. Including what executors you are using (I think this means "claude code" or the like), whether attempts succeeded or not and their exit codes, and various booleans like whether or not a project is an existing one, or whether or not you've set up scripts to run with it. This really strikes me as something that should be, must legally be in many jurisdictions, opt in.
- arresin 1y ago
  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.
  - willsmith72 1y ago
    It's the email/username harvesting that you mean right? Or do people also have something against anonymised product analytics?
    - gpm 1y ago
      I have something against opt-out analytics over TCP/IP or UDP/IP period, because they aren't anonymized, they include an IP address by virtue of the protocol. But I definitely only posted that original complaint of the email/username (not the person you responded to initially).
    - const_cast 1y ago
      > anonymised product analytics? They're not anonymous, they're just pseudo-anonymous. It's incredibly easy to collect pieces of data A thru Z that, on their own, are anonymous but, all together, are not. It's also incredibly easy to collect data that you think is generic but is actually not. Do you query the screen size? I have bad news for you. But, all of this is besides the point: when that data is exfiltrated to a third-party service, you have no idea how it's being used. You have a piece of paper, if you're lucky, telling you the privacy policy, which is usually "you have no privacy dumbass". Even if data appears completely anonymous to humans, it can be ingested by machine learning algorithms that can spot patterns and de-anonymize the data. I mean, we have companies who's entire business model is "how do we string together bits of data and tie it to real-world identity?": namely Google. Turns out it's remarkably easy when you have your hands in a lot of different pots. Collect a little anonymous data here, a little there, and boom: now you know that Billy Joe who lives on First Street loves to go to Walmart at 1 AM and buy Ben and Jerry's ice cream in a moment of weakness.
uxamanda 1y ago
If you use gitlab, you can use the command line "glab" tool to have agents work from the built in kanban. They can open and close tasks, start MRs off of them etc. It's not as integrated as this tool, but works well with a mix of humans and robots.
- louiskw 1y ago
  Interesting, hadn't heard of that. Would better GitLab support be useful in Vibe Kanban?
  - PaulIH 1y ago
    Yes, being able to use Gitlab as a provider would mean that we would jump on the tool, being Gitlab-based. :)
jjangkke 1y ago
I'm not sure if Kanban is the right UI for what this is supposed to be for, just a gut feeling. Curious what other UI is more appropriate for this.
- louiskw 1y ago
  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.
drbojingle 1y ago
I'm building one of these too :D
skeeter2020 1y ago
If I multiply my 100x productivity gains from using AI with your 10x increase what am I supposed to do with all that free time?
- ffsm8 1y ago
  Maybe Tony can inspire you? ( ◠ ‿ ・ ) — https://youtube.com/shorts/YBAcvRV7VSM?si=jp2hZvFIVo-vSdu6 https://youtube.com/shorts/YBAcvRV7VSM?si=jp2hZvFIVo-vSdu6
  - Vaslo 1y ago
    Lol - nice find
jackbridger 1y ago
This is interesting. I’m using Claude Code a fair bit and have found writing specs to be more effective than promoting and this feels closer to that. I can see the appeal of this for simple tasks now and maybe increasingly bigger tasks as models get better.
- louiskw 1y ago
  Very much a bet that things are going to get much much better very quickly
sqs 1y ago
This is really cool. I used Vibe Kanban with Amp to update some of our docs and UI components, and it was great.
- louiskw 1y ago
  I would say conservatively that 80% of Vibe Kanban has been built by Amp
helsinki 1y ago
So far, it’s relatively bug-free well-written code that I’ve forked to work behind the walls of a hedge fund, and it works, but the reality is that it doesn’t provide anything that some terminal windows and git worktrees can’t offer. Am I missing something? You really need to add more features, because I struggle to find a compelling reason for advanced users to use it.
sails 1y ago
If you could consider how a team could use linear in conjunction with this that would be very interesting. I would imagine matching tickets/conversations from Linear mcp to use as an overlay of context
notarobot123 1y ago
I'd be interested in how it _feels_ to run with this workflow for an extended period. If you're doing code reviews, writing new tickets, evaluating progress and guiding the overall structure of a project, do you loose something important or is it genuinely a satisfying way of working which you could imagine sustaining for the long-term?
mahsima 1y ago
Great Add it to this lists, i think it helps: https://github.com/tokyo-dal/awesome-ai-coding-tools https://github.com/tokyo-dal/awesome-ai-coding-tools https://github.com/devtoolsd/awesome-devtools https://github.com/devtoolsd/awesome-devtools and any awesome lists related to ai development
adastra22 1y ago
> 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. Is this really the case?
- sexeriy237 1y ago
  No, if we can review 10 PRs a day and AI writes one of them, we now have to review 11 PRs
broast 1y ago
This tool just made me realize I've been vibe coding at years for work as a manager. Great job, this is a game changer so far for me!
akifq 1y ago
Ran Vibe Kanban on a side repo over the weekend it’s slick, but I tripped on one thing: all the agents write into the same checkout, so parallel cards can clobber each other when they touch the same files. I’ve been spinning up a quick `git worktree` per card as a stop gap. Outside of that, really enjoying the flow. BTW, if anyone’s juggling multiple agents and wants a “quarantine” layer before changes hit Git, I’m hacking on SAV (Shadow VCS)open source, risk scores every commit and keeps them sandboxed until you approve. Happy to swap notes. https://github.com/AKIFQ/sav https://github.com/AKIFQ/sav
- BoiledCabbage 1y ago
  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.
- louiskw 1y ago
  Are you sure you're using vibe-kanban? The project spins up a worktree for each task attempt specifically to solve this problem.
koistya 1y ago
Cool project! Been messing with AI agents for code stuff, and this Kanban setup for parallel tasks looks super handy—gonna try it on my next hack. Quick Q: handling token tracking per user/org? Got tons of experience from building UsagePilot (open-core lib for AI metrics). Happy to chat if you need a second pair of hands on that front!
Shypangz 1y ago
Waiting around for AI agents to finish can kill productivity. You might want to try leads app to organize tasks and keep track of progress smoothly. It helped me stay focused while letting background work run without distractions.

195 points by louiskw 1y ago

lharries 1y ago

I used this last week and it's excellent - feels like the same increase in productivity increase from when I first used Cursor. Are you thinking of doing a hosted version so I can have my team collab on it? And I found I could open lots of PRs at once but they often need to be dependent on each other - and then I want to make a change to the first one. How are you thinking of better managing that flow?

louiskw 1y ago
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
hddbbdbfnfdk 1y ago
Very productive increase sirs! Whole team well promoted.

slig 1y ago

How does this compare with Backlog.md? [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483530

ggordonhall 1y ago
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.
- slig 1y ago
  Thank you! I was taking a look at the docs, and I'm going to play with it later today. Thanks for sharing and congrats on shipping!
mrlesk 1y ago
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!

randysalami 1y ago

I tried to build something similar but in a peer-to-peer fashion and for humans + AI. It was supposed to be like a Kanban board that could scale to any team size and use Planning AI to ingest/match/monitor work realtime across teams and agents. I ran out of steam and couldn’t get funding but here is the prototype version: https://postwork-alpha.vercel.app/ https://postwork-alpha.vercel.app/ User: maryann.biaggioli@astarconsulting.com Pass: Test1234! I never got to a point where I actually integrated AI agents (weren’t as good at the time) but it’s cool to see it working in the real world!

swalsh 1y ago

I built something similar for my own workflow. Works okay. The hard part is as you scale, you end up with compounded false affirmatives. Model adds some fallback mechanism that makes it work, tests pass, etc. The nice part is you can ask models to review the code from others, call out fallbacks, hard coding, stuff like that. It does a good job at identifying buried bodies. But if you dig up a buried body, I'd manually confirm it was properly disposed of as the models usually hid the body in the first place because they needed some input they didn't have, got confused or ran into an issue.

deepdarkforest 1y ago

This is a launch by a YC company that converts enterprise cobol code into java. 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. It's chaos. Thats fine if you are vibe coding an unimportant nextjs/vercel demo, but i'm really sceptical of all this stance that you should be proud of how abstracted you are from code. A kanban board to just shoot off as many tasks as possible and just quickly read over the PR's is crazy to me. If you want to appear a serious company that should be allowed to write enterprise code, imo this path is so risky. I see this in quite a few podcasts, tweets etc. People bragging how abstracted they are from their own product anymore. Again, maybe i am missing something, but all of this github copilot/just reviewing like 10 coding agents PR's just introduces so much noise and slop. Is it really what you want your image to be as a code company?

unshavedyak 1y ago
> 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.
- helsinki 1y ago
  This works in theory and somewhat in practice but it is not as clean as people make it seem, as someone who has spent tens of thousands on Opus tokens and worktrees - it’s just not that great. It works, but it’s just, ugh, boring, super tedious, etc. at the end of it all, you’re still sitting around waiting for Claude to merge conflicts.
louiskw 1y ago

skeptrune 1y ago

I remember the original Bloop search engine! Some kind of UI or management system like this seems like it would be high level useful. Will have to give it a run.

louiskw 1y ago
Nostalgia! Let me know if any issues, we're turning feedback around pretty quick

shibeprime 1y ago

Now we just let a CTO agent create the cards, review, and merge the PRs?

ggordonhall 1y ago
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 :)

_jayhack_ 1y ago

Very cool and interesting project. Ideas like this are a threat to traditionally-conceived project management platforms like Linear; that being said, Linear and others (Monday, ClickUp, etc.) are pushing aggressively into UX built for human/AI collaboration. I guess the question is how quickly they can execute and how many novel features are required to properly bring AI into the human project workspace

louiskw 1y ago
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.

oc1 1y ago

We need something like a kitchen brigade in software - one who writes the vibe code tickets (Chef de Vibe), one who reviews the vibe code (Sous-Vibe), one who oversees the agents and restarts them if they get hung up (Agent de Station). We could theoretically smash thousand tickets a day with this principle

ggordonhall 1y ago
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.
atavistically 1y ago
c.f. "Surgical Team" in 'The Mythical Man-Month' by Fred Brooks. That book is perennially relevant.

csomar 1y ago

Why does this need GitHub auth? This asks for unlimited private access to ones repo. This is a hard NO from me.

louiskw 1y ago
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
- csomar 1y ago
  Then you should have gone with a GitHub App instead of an Oauth App. The difference is that a GitHub App allows granularity of selection.

bpshaver 1y ago

> Get 10x more out of... So you're saying it goes up to 11x?

louiskw 1y ago
Great ChatGPT question XD
skeeter2020 1y ago
AI was already giving you 100x so we're up to 1000x

remram 1y ago

Why do you need to "manage" your coding agents like they are people? How long does it take them to do a task once prompted, in the background? Don't you just prompt an immediately review the result?

scotty79 1y ago
I don't think smart ones are that fast. They can work for hours if you have the budget.
- remram 1y ago
  Interesting, I didn't know that.
louiskw 1y ago
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.
gpm 1y ago
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.

swyx 1y ago

Louis did a long form chat and vibe coded extra features in our discord meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCksand7Iwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCksand7Iwo for more info on this

louiskw 1y ago
"11 days ago" this feels like a year ago :O

doritosfan84 1y ago

The permissions this asks for feel kinda insane to me. Why does a kanban board need to see the code or my deploy keys among other things?

jeltz 1y ago
I would assume because it was vibe coded.
- gpm 1y ago
  More generously I'd assume because - It's an early prototype so they haven't dealt with fine grained permissions - They really do want to do things like access private repos with it themselves - They really do want the ability to do things like checkout code, create PRs, etc... and that involves a lot of permission.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    every one of your "more generous" assumptions is the opposite of what should be their process. It's the equivalent of "vacuum up as much data as possible and then decide what to do with it". Not acceptable.
    - gpm 1y ago
      It's "vacuuming" that data in the sense of giving API access to a tool that runs on your local computer, that seems acceptable enough for me in the early stages of developing a tool. The other privacy complains I have regarding them harvesting usernames and email addresses... not so much.
TeMPOraL 1y ago
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.

barbazoo 1y ago

> 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.

bwfan123 1y ago
> 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.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  I'll add - often not adding the last part is even MORE powerful: "and everyone is now using agents to increase their productivity..."
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ljm 1y ago
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.

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amirhirsch 1y ago

great. now i have to spend my morning using vibe kanban to make a tui for vibe kanban with textual. i'll submit a pr as soon as it's finished.

Jolter 1y ago
It says in the linked readme to not open pull requests without discussing it first.

peadarohaodha 1y ago

Would love to have a good selection of keyboard shortcuts! Power Vibe Kanban

louiskw 1y ago
Good point - there are a few random ones already but I will ask a coding agent to implement this comprehensively

lowdownbutter 1y ago

[flagged]

diggan 1y ago

That's an interesting idea and looks neat! I have my own developed agent running locally in containers, and currently use GitHub issues+pull requests for coordinating all the asynchronous work. Do you have any pointers on the approach I should take if I basically have something like a service already running for this, and I just want to hook up your UI to use it instead? Just some broad pointers on what would be required would be most helpful already!

gpm 1y ago

I definitely don't feel like the models are reliable enough that I'd be more productive running them in parallel like this yet, but I can see a future where I want this. Their reliability probably varies a lot depending on what you are using them for - so maybe I'm just using them in more difficult (for claude) domains.

louiskw 1y ago
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.

FailMore 1y ago

Do you think you will keep it free or can you see a business model developing around it? If so, what do you think it would be? / How would you split paid tiers vs free users? Not a big deal to me...!! But I'm curious how one might commercialise these types of free/open source projects

louiskw 1y ago
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.

MH15 1y ago

Can you use this with the Claude Code Github Action?

gpm 1y ago

Hmm, analytics appear to default to enabled: https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59ab97d714cf921714611b7e38/backend/src/models/config.rs#L166C13-L166C30 https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59... It is harvesting email addresses and github usernames: https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59ab97d714cf921714611b7e38/backend/src/routes/auth.rs#L234 https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59... Then it seems to track every time you start/finish/merge/attempt a task, and every time you run a dev server. Including what executors you are using (I think this means "claude code" or the like), whether attempts succeeded or not and their exit codes, and various booleans like whether or not a project is an existing one, or whether or not you've set up scripts to run with it. This really strikes me as something that should be, must legally be in many jurisdictions, opt in.

arresin 1y ago
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.
- willsmith72 1y ago
  It's the email/username harvesting that you mean right? Or do people also have something against anonymised product analytics?
  - gpm 1y ago
    I have something against opt-out analytics over TCP/IP or UDP/IP period, because they aren't anonymized, they include an IP address by virtue of the protocol. But I definitely only posted that original complaint of the email/username (not the person you responded to initially).
  - const_cast 1y ago
    > anonymised product analytics? They're not anonymous, they're just pseudo-anonymous. It's incredibly easy to collect pieces of data A thru Z that, on their own, are anonymous but, all together, are not. It's also incredibly easy to collect data that you think is generic but is actually not. Do you query the screen size? I have bad news for you. But, all of this is besides the point: when that data is exfiltrated to a third-party service, you have no idea how it's being used. You have a piece of paper, if you're lucky, telling you the privacy policy, which is usually "you have no privacy dumbass". Even if data appears completely anonymous to humans, it can be ingested by machine learning algorithms that can spot patterns and de-anonymize the data. I mean, we have companies who's entire business model is "how do we string together bits of data and tie it to real-world identity?": namely Google. Turns out it's remarkably easy when you have your hands in a lot of different pots. Collect a little anonymous data here, a little there, and boom: now you know that Billy Joe who lives on First Street loves to go to Walmart at 1 AM and buy Ben and Jerry's ice cream in a moment of weakness.

uxamanda 1y ago

If you use gitlab, you can use the command line "glab" tool to have agents work from the built in kanban. They can open and close tasks, start MRs off of them etc. It's not as integrated as this tool, but works well with a mix of humans and robots.

louiskw 1y ago
Interesting, hadn't heard of that. Would better GitLab support be useful in Vibe Kanban?
- PaulIH 1y ago
  Yes, being able to use Gitlab as a provider would mean that we would jump on the tool, being Gitlab-based. :)

jjangkke 1y ago

I'm not sure if Kanban is the right UI for what this is supposed to be for, just a gut feeling. Curious what other UI is more appropriate for this.

louiskw 1y ago
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.

drbojingle 1y ago

I'm building one of these too :D

skeeter2020 1y ago

If I multiply my 100x productivity gains from using AI with your 10x increase what am I supposed to do with all that free time?

ffsm8 1y ago
Maybe Tony can inspire you? ( ◠ ‿ ・ ) — https://youtube.com/shorts/YBAcvRV7VSM?si=jp2hZvFIVo-vSdu6 https://youtube.com/shorts/YBAcvRV7VSM?si=jp2hZvFIVo-vSdu6
- Vaslo 1y ago
  Lol - nice find

jackbridger 1y ago

This is interesting. I’m using Claude Code a fair bit and have found writing specs to be more effective than promoting and this feels closer to that. I can see the appeal of this for simple tasks now and maybe increasingly bigger tasks as models get better.

louiskw 1y ago
Very much a bet that things are going to get much much better very quickly

sqs 1y ago

This is really cool. I used Vibe Kanban with Amp to update some of our docs and UI components, and it was great.

louiskw 1y ago
I would say conservatively that 80% of Vibe Kanban has been built by Amp

helsinki 1y ago

So far, it’s relatively bug-free well-written code that I’ve forked to work behind the walls of a hedge fund, and it works, but the reality is that it doesn’t provide anything that some terminal windows and git worktrees can’t offer. Am I missing something? You really need to add more features, because I struggle to find a compelling reason for advanced users to use it.

sails 1y ago

If you could consider how a team could use linear in conjunction with this that would be very interesting. I would imagine matching tickets/conversations from Linear mcp to use as an overlay of context

notarobot123 1y ago

I'd be interested in how it _feels_ to run with this workflow for an extended period. If you're doing code reviews, writing new tickets, evaluating progress and guiding the overall structure of a project, do you loose something important or is it genuinely a satisfying way of working which you could imagine sustaining for the long-term?

mahsima 1y ago

Great Add it to this lists, i think it helps: https://github.com/tokyo-dal/awesome-ai-coding-tools https://github.com/tokyo-dal/awesome-ai-coding-tools https://github.com/devtoolsd/awesome-devtools https://github.com/devtoolsd/awesome-devtools and any awesome lists related to ai development

adastra22 1y ago

> 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. Is this really the case?

sexeriy237 1y ago
No, if we can review 10 PRs a day and AI writes one of them, we now have to review 11 PRs

broast 1y ago

This tool just made me realize I've been vibe coding at years for work as a manager. Great job, this is a game changer so far for me!

akifq 1y ago

Ran Vibe Kanban on a side repo over the weekend it’s slick, but I tripped on one thing: all the agents write into the same checkout, so parallel cards can clobber each other when they touch the same files. I’ve been spinning up a quick `git worktree` per card as a stop gap. Outside of that, really enjoying the flow. BTW, if anyone’s juggling multiple agents and wants a “quarantine” layer before changes hit Git, I’m hacking on SAV (Shadow VCS)open source, risk scores every commit and keeps them sandboxed until you approve. Happy to swap notes. https://github.com/AKIFQ/sav https://github.com/AKIFQ/sav

BoiledCabbage 1y ago
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.
louiskw 1y ago
Are you sure you're using vibe-kanban? The project spins up a worktree for each task attempt specifically to solve this problem.

koistya 1y ago

Cool project! Been messing with AI agents for code stuff, and this Kanban setup for parallel tasks looks super handy—gonna try it on my next hack. Quick Q: handling token tracking per user/org? Got tons of experience from building UsagePilot (open-core lib for AI metrics). Happy to chat if you need a second pair of hands on that front!

Shypangz 1y ago

Waiting around for AI agents to finish can kill productivity. You might want to try leads app to organize tasks and keep track of progress smoothly. It helped me stay focused while letting background work run without distractions.