Kanban Board

abtars has a built-in kanban board for tracking work. The main agent acts as team leader — it picks up completed work, delivers results, and tracks everything in one place.

How it works

Task runs → writes to board → main agent polls → delivers result → marks delivered

Any source can create cards:

• Task scheduler — cron tasks write automatically
• User — ask the agent ("remind me to X by Friday")
• Agent — self-assigns work, decomposes into sub-cards
• Peer — delegated from another host (future)

Commands

Command	What it shows
/kanban	Active board (queued, running, done, failed)
/kanban all	Everything including delivered
/kanban status=done	Filter by status
/kanban source=task	Only task-scheduler cards
/kanban priority=HIGH	Urgent items
/kanban type=research	By card type
/kanban labels=finance	By tag

Card lifecycle

📥 queued → ⏳ running → 📬 done → 🚚 delivering → ✓ delivered
                           ↓
                         ❌ failed (after 3 delivery attempts or task error)

Agent delivery

When a card reaches done:

1. Main agent picks it up on the next heartbeat tick
2. Announces completion briefly ("Your finance report is ready — see attached 📄")
3. Attaches the result file as a document
4. Marks the card delivered

If delivery fails (model error, rate limit), it retries up to 3 times. After 3 failures, the card is marked failed.

Agent tool

The agent has a kanban_manage tool and can:

• Create cards: "add to my board: review the RSS output quality"
• Update cards: change priority, add labels, set deadlines
• List cards: check what's pending

Storage

SQLite database at ~/.abtars/kanban/kanban.db. Included in abtars backup --config.

Cards older than 7 days (after delivery) are automatically purged.

Recovery

If the board state itself becomes corrupted or wedged, /kanban nuke (owner-only) schedules a full board reset:

1. /kanban nuke records a timestamp marker and returns immediately — nothing is paused.
2. On the next bridge start, a request younger than 5 minutes removes only kanban.db, kanban.db-wal, and kanban.db-shm and rebuilds an empty, valid board before normal startup continues.

Tasks, configuration, secrets, logs, and supervisor state are never touched. An expired request is ignored unchanged; issuing the command again overwrites it.

Scheduled projects are additionally protected by circuit breakers: a broken card cannot spin Orc work indefinitely. If /orc status shows a tripped fuse, /orc reset project <id> (or /orc reset bridge) clears it after you have fixed the underlying cause.

Schema

Each card has: title, source, priority, status, type, labels, notes, due date, result file, parent card (for subtasks), and blocked-by (dependencies).