Show HN: Vibe Kanban – Kanban board to manage your AI coding agents
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.
It is harvesting email addresses and github usernames: 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.
I will leave this open for comments for the next hour and then merge.
It really doesn't hurt to be honest about this and ask up-front. This is clear enough and benign enough that I'd actually be happy to opt-in.
I think also that this would be better as an mcp tool / resource. Let the model operate and query it as needed.
But I definitely only posted that original complaint of the email/username (not the person you responded to initially).
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.
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
Where I live I think this would violate PIPEDA, the Canadian privacy law that covers all business that do business in any Canadian province/territory other than BC/Alberta/Quebec (which all have similar laws).
There's generally no exception in these for "open source devtools" - laws are typically still laws even if release something for free. The Canadian version (though I don't think the GDPR does) has an exception for entirely non-commercial organizations, but Bloop AI appears to be a commercial organization so it wouldn't apply. It also contains an exception for business contact information - but as I understand it that is not interpreted broadly enough to cover random developers email addresses just because they happen to be used for a potentially personal github account.
Disclaimer: Not a lawyer. You should probably consult a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction (i.e. all of them) if it actually matters to you.
> privacy law that covers all business that do business in any Canadian province
A random group of people uploaded free software source code and said 'hey world, try this out'. I wish the GDPR and the PIPEDA the best of luck in keeping people from doing that. (Not to actually defend the telemetry, tbh that's kinda sleezy imo.)
And the laws don't prevent you from uploading "random" software and saying "try this". They prevent you from uploading spyware and saying "try this". Edit: Nor does the Canadian one cover any random group of people, it covers commercial entities, which Bloop AI appears to be.
great catch, many open source projects appear to be just an elaborate lead gen tool these days.
I'm not particularly inclined to publish it because I don't want to associate myself with a project harvesting emails like this.
Please do the same for Aider :-)
https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/issues/4250
There's a big difference between "something actually ready for use" and "claude hacked sometime together with bubblegum and ducttape that works on my system" though - doing it properly will probably take a bit of work.
Is this really the case?
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.
Add it to this lists, i think it helps:
https://github.com/tokyo-dal/awesome-ai-coding-tools
https://github.com/devtoolsd/awesome-devtools
and any awesome lists related to ai development
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?
Also now we're pushing many more PRs think we defo need better ways to stack and review work. Will look into this asap
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?
This feel like much too broad a statement to be true.
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.
No comments yet
> > This feel like much too broad a statement to be true.
This is just what they wish to be true.
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.
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'm glad I work for a regulated industry where we still have some kind of responsibility and pride for what we do. I could never work for the kind of irresponsible anarchy that AI is creating.
- 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.
The other privacy complains I have regarding them harvesting usernames and email addresses... not so much.
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.
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?
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.
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.
( ◠ ‿ ・ ) —
https://youtube.com/shorts/YBAcvRV7VSM?si=jp2hZvFIVo-vSdu6
I would imagine matching tickets/conversations from Linear mcp to use as an overlay of context
You really need to add more features, because I struggle to find a compelling reason for advanced users to use it.
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!
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483530
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't you just prompt an immediately review the result?
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.
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.
Things move across the board so quickly when AI is doing the work that ~50% of the columns seem pretty redundant.
Some kind of UI or management system like this seems like it would be high level useful. Will have to give it a run.
Let me know if any issues, we're turning feedback around pretty quick
So you're saying it goes up to 11x?
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 :)