Kanban

What This Skill Does

The Kanban skill transforms your AI agent into a persistent project management powerhouse. By implementing a standardized file-based architecture in ~/kanban/, the agent gains the ability to track multiple projects simultaneously. It utilizes a deterministic discovery protocol to locate boards across your workspace, ensuring that project context is never lost between sessions. The skill relies on a rigid schema for cards—requiring fields like id, state, and priority—which allows the agent to process tasks, move cards through lanes, and enforce WIP (Work In Progress) limits consistently without hallucinating board structures.

Installation

To add this capability to your agent, run the following command in your OpenClaw terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ivangdavila/kanban

Ensure you have read/write access to your user home directory, as the skill initializes its primary memory store at ~/kanban/.

Use Cases

• Cross-Project Task Management: Juggle multiple software development projects, creative writing drafts, or personal task lists without the boards bleeding into one another.
• Automated Workflow Enforcement: Have the agent automatically move tasks from 'In Progress' to 'Review' based on your project-specific rules.md files.
• Persistent Context Retention: When returning to a project after days of inactivity, the agent uses the index.md registry to immediately recall the state and path of your project boards.
• Team-Aligned Processing: Because the file structure is standardized, multiple agent instances or human collaborators can interface with the same boards if synced via version control.

Example Prompts

1. "Check the 'Refactor' project board and tell me which high-priority tasks are currently blocked."
2. "Add a new card to the Website Redesign project: 'Update CSS theme', priority high, assigned to me."
3. "Move the task 'Finalize Documentation' to the 'Done' lane and update the project log."

Tips & Limitations

• Atomic Operations: Always allow the agent to finish its write cycle. If a process is interrupted, check log.md in the project folder to verify the last successful update.
• Customization: While you can modify rules.md to change lane names (e.g., 'To Do' vs 'Backlog'), maintain the core card schema (id, title, state) to ensure the agent's logic doesn't break.
• Scope: If you have many projects, keep the index.md file clean. If the agent struggles to find a board, explicitly mention the project alias to force the discovery protocol to trigger.