Kanban

kanban

Kanban is a visual control plane over the live Harness session tree. Harness and the session manager own execution, messages, status, and parent-child relationships. The worktree Worker owns isolated Git directories, branches, status, and landing. Kanban binds them through durable run definitions, executor selection, dependencies, retries, and explicit review acceptance.

When to use

• A task has independent workstreams that should execute concurrently.
• A person wants to see existing Harness child sessions as cards and open the underlying conversation from the board.
• External workers exposing the shared task contract should participate in the same run as native Harness sessions.
• Parallel implementation tasks need separate branches and filesystem roots.
• A dependent task should wait until its prerequisite reaches Review.
• Completed worker output needs an explicit Review to Done gate.

Workflow

1. Call kanban::executors::list and select only executors whose available field is true.
2. Create one coherent run with kanban::runs::create. Set repo_path and isolation: worktree_per_task for parallel Git work. Give every task a stable key, bounded instruction, executor ID, and descriptive title. Use depends_on keys for ordering and auto_dispatch: false only when the person wants a staging gate.
3. Read kanban::board after kanban::changed events. Do not poll it on a timer.
4. Open root_session_id or a task's external_session_id when the detailed transcript is needed.
5. Retry only needs_you tasks. Accept only tasks in review after checking their result.
6. Call kanban::tasks::land only after review and only with the intended target branch. Landing is an explicit operator action, never automatic.

Boundaries

• Do not create a second message bus or scheduler. Use the existing session, state, and Harness functions.
• Do not invent an executor from its name. Executor availability comes from the live function registry.
• Do not create ad-hoc directories for isolated work. Use worktree::create through the run isolation contract and pass its path to the child executor.
• Harness-projected runs are read-only board projections. Their session tree remains authoritative.
• Kanban-owned task controls must use the kanban::tasks::* functions so durable metadata and reactive updates remain consistent.

Functions

The Console page ID is kanban. Open it from another injected page with host.panels.open({ pageId: 'kanban' }).