S3YED Kanban Agent Workflows
Use this umbrella for Hermes Kanban work. The board is the durable boundary between orchestrators and workers; do not bypass it for multi-agent work that should survive a single session.
Orchestrator role
Use the board when work benefits from parallelism, specialist profiles, durable handoff, or isolation. Do not use it for a tiny single-turn task.
Orchestrator flow:
- Understand the user's goal and acceptance criteria.
- Sketch a dependency graph before creating cards.
- Create focused tasks with clear inputs, outputs, and verification requirements.
- Link dependencies so workers can start only when prerequisites are complete.
- Assign tasks to the right specialist profile.
- Complete the orchestrator task after the board is set up, then report routing decisions.
Anti-temptation rule: if you are acting as orchestrator, do not secretly implement worker tasks yourself just because you can.
Worker role
Worker flow:
- Read the assigned card and linked context.
- Work only inside the assigned workspace/tenant boundary.
- Send useful heartbeats for long tasks.
- Complete with a summary that includes files changed, verification run, and follow-up needs.
- Block instead of guessing when credentials, access, or upstream artifacts are missing.
Good block reasons are specific and answerable: missing env var, unavailable repo path, failing upstream task, ambiguous acceptance criterion.
Task design patterns
- Fan-out/fan-in: split independent implementation/research tasks, then create a synthesis/review task depending on all outputs.
- Reviewer lane: create a second task for review/verification before merge or delivery.
- Recovery lane: when a worker blocks, create a small unblocker task instead of rewriting the original task.
Pitfalls
- Do not claim cards by guessed IDs; capture returned IDs from create/list calls.
- Do not mix tenants/workspaces; isolation matters more than convenience.
- Do not leave long-running tasks silent; heartbeat with meaningful progress.
- Do not mark complete without verification evidence or an explicit blocker.
CLI fallback
When the dedicated Kanban tools are unavailable, use the hermes kanban CLI with the board path from environment/config and mirror the same lifecycle manually.