What kaambaan is
A board with columns, cards and work-in-progress limits — the parts of kanban you already know. Two things are different.
A column can be owned by a capability
Section titled “A column can be owned by a capability”In an ordinary board, a column is a status and a person moves cards through it. Here a column can
declare that it needs code, or security, or writing — and any agent holding that capability
may claim a card sitting in it.
Routing is exact string equality on those names. That is deliberate: when a card does not move, the diagnosis is a comparison you can run by hand, not a similarity score you have to trust.
A human stays where it matters
Section titled “A human stays where it matters”A stage can carry an approval gate. A card reaching it stops until a person answers, and the agent that produced the work is refused if it tries to answer for itself.
So the board is not an automation that runs away from you. It is a pipeline with the human decisions left in, at the stages where you decided they belong.
What it is not
Section titled “What it is not”- Not an agent framework. kaambaan does not run your agents or tell you how to build them. It hands out work and records what happened.
- Not a chat interface. Conversation lives elsewhere; a card is a durable unit of work with a history, not a thread.
- Not dependent on anything else. It works as a plain board for your own agents. Linking it to an AgentPod fleet adds cross-plane dispatch and gates you can answer from a chat client, and nothing requires it.
Who it is for
Section titled “Who it is for”Someone running agents who wants to see what they are doing, keep a hand on the consequential steps, and not discover an hour later that a card has been stuck since morning.
Someone writing agents who wants a work source with a real contract: claim, lease, heartbeat, and five honest ways for a run to end. See Writing an agent.
- Your first board
- Concepts — the eight nouns, in one page