Posted by gbro3n 8 hours ago
GitOps & team friendly kanban board integration inside VS Code Structured plan / todo / implement via @kanban commands Leverages your existing agent harness rather than trying to bundle a built in one .md task format provides a permanent (editable) source of truth including considerations, decisions and actions, that is resistant to context rot
Storing the plan and discussion as Markdown in Git is an interesting approach. It basically treats the agent’s reasoning as part of the project history, not just the final code.
Curious if others here are doing something similar to keep context across sessions.
I agree with the other commenter who said they don't build anything without a plan. I would double down on that and say that you need to overplan, and regularly toss out plans as you do research/discovery.
> The workflow I’m going to describe has one core principle: never let Claude write code until you’ve reviewed and approved a written plan. This separation of planning and execution is the single most important thing I do. It prevents wasted effort, keeps me in control of architecture decisions, and produces significantly better results with minimal token usage than jumping straight to code.
Name and dates can also be stored in the filename and file metadata.
Furthermore, an existing kanban (ticket) workflow will expect you to refine the context into something more ... concentrated, or at least something that we are used to seeing as developers working with tickets, at least more so than the chat history that seem to be favored.
Have you put any thought into how this would integrate into such a process?
I also considered a full harness that could stream / sync the responses, but as per my comment below, implementing a full harness meant loosing a lot of the IDE integration features that come with the hand off to GitHub Copilot.
> I went down the route of implementing a full harness for a while like Vibe Kanban, but the issue was that it was unlikely (without significant effort) to be as good as Github Copilot chat, and it meant forfeiting all of the IDE integrations etc (like diff visualisation for the agents actions etc).
Having worked with a flow similar to this for a while - the markdown files become quite valuable as a history of planning and decisions for features. I didn't want to loose that. I just needed some help with managing the plan files I was maintaining - which the kanban board tooling does. A few command shortcuts via @kanban help too
Regarding what goes into the files, the agent tends to be quite concise - you don't see the whole train of thought that some of the harnesses surface.
Highly structured pseudo agile practices like scrum, never mind SAfE, make even less sense now than they did before. Flat collegial teams for the win.
But you're right - you can visualize your workflow without using Kanban - I think it's weird how the term gets appropriated here.
Interesting to see the Kanban workflow being adapted to managing agents, makes sense; each item having the same UX as a Github Issue.
Having the Kanban board in VS Code where I'm working, backed by markdown, GitOps friendly files works really well. Moving from the markdown file to the chat editor to type 'plan', 'implement' isn't what I really wanted, but it's really not a problem once you get used to the flow.
It reminds me of how Zed wants to have built in Slack when it will be impossible to get everyone to use Zed. A feature that can never really materialize because developers get a say in their tools