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Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

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Re: Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

#161

Post by rirze »

waterproof wrote: post #127
rirze wrote: post #110

I see a bunch of these orchestrators, but is anything out there jj (jujitsu) native? I would really like to avoid hacking onto an existing product.

If Jujutsu had become popular a couple of years earlier, it might have had a chance to catch on. I worry that it missed the most critical training window for AI and we may be locked in on Git forever.

This is not true at all, a year ago it was difficult to force models to use jj consistently, but nowadays, (codex+chatgpt, at the very least) models very nicely obey jj workflows when guided in AGENTS.md . They have been training models to use it.

Edit: my original comment was related to how git worktrees are by default used in the implementation of these agent orchestration tools. I would rather prefer jj workspaces.

Re: Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

#163

Post by steelcm »

nullbio wrote: post #122

One thing I don't understand with all of these, is how they're handling different worktree infrastructure spin-up? For example, if I have a webapp, I want each of the worktrees to spin up its own infrastructure, and be accessible on its own unique local url, so that I can see the changes locally for each worktree, or I can have agents automate visual checks using something like agent-browser. Currently I use docker f…

Check out emdash.sh - each task spins up its own worktree with a bunch of pre-defined environment variables that are injected. This includes `EMDASH_PORT` a uniquey port for a 10 port range. Very useful for running multiple services from a single monorepo.

Re: Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

#164

Post by phil21 »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #41
aitchnyu wrote: post #30

I keep wondering how people accept a nights worth of agent activity. I feel 30 minutes of planning and 30 minutes of implementation in my solo side project's repo is too big to review. At minute 5, I may ask the AI to redo stuff even as its spitting out code.

Most of the narrative is about how AI is writing all/most code, but I’d wager that the fraction of human reviewed code is approaching zero far faster than anyone is realizing or willing to admit.

Pretty much. For my home IT projects I have been playing around with various means of implementing agents.

I’ve looked at the outputs here and there - and holy hell would it never pass review if I were trying to make something robust and anti-fragile. But since I can just have AI spit out a fix for the horrific “code” when it breaks in a totally predictable manner it’s just not worth my time to try to actually sit down and get it done right. Or even fight with AI by providing a good specification and design guidelines.

I imagine this is how things are going in the real world, given 30 years of working with various levels of humans. So long as the output is “good enough” it is the extreme minority of folks who care about much else. And that’s for mid-level to senior folks who have the experience to know better. Juniors wouldn’t even be able to pick out most of even the most obvious anti-patterns AI tends to spit out such as putting configuration within code, etc.

Refactoring is just in a new world too, that us olds probably have a hard time with. It’s no longer examine the code, identify design gaps, find high leverage places to start fixing, etc. It’s now “this is broken, rewrite from scratch” when it eventually turns into too much spaghetti.

In some ways being entirely focused on the outcomes is freeing in a way. But man under the hood is crazy and a whole new world.

Re: Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

#165

Post by jappgar »

stavros wrote: post #49
fphilipe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder the same. The answer I usually get from people who do manage is that they don't look at the code – or at least not in detail. Personally, I always end up tweaking something the agent produced. I wonder if I should let go of that control...

I never look at code. It used to be that it quickly became unmaintainable spaghetti where the agent struggled to make any change at all, but in the past year (and with a three step plan/develop/review workflow), the quality is so good that I basically just don't look at the code any more. It definitely has fewer bugs than a senior developer, but it really hinges on getting the plan right. 20 minutes of planning and 2…

20 minutes planning, 20 minutes coding, 200 minutes review and refactor (includes going for a walk and thinking about the problem deeply).

I know a lot of engineers who skip the last part. They're over confident in their original plan. They're over confident the agent actually fulfilled the plan.

Re: Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

#166

Post by jappgar »

materielle wrote: post #55
stavros wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never look at code. It used to be that it quickly became unmaintainable spaghetti where the agent struggled to make any change at all, but in the past year (and with a three step plan/develop/review workflow), the quality is so good that I basically just don't look at the code any more. It definitely has fewer bugs than a senior developer, but it really hinges on getting the plan right. 20 minutes of planning and 2…

This brings to mind two thoughts: First, that this is challenging to scale across large orgs. Even if your plans produce high quality code, that isn’t true for everyone. I’m definitely struggling with slop code being collectively mailed to me for review my our 1,000 engineers that were told to use their AI subscription all at once. I feel like we should be taking “prompt engineering” more seriously. And when people m…

I'm so curious to see how other people prompt but literally no one I work with will share it. They might share plans, but they never show the conversation, which is the most crucial part.

Judging by how they struggle to communicate generally, I can't imagine their prompts are doing much heavy lifting.

Re: Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

#167

Post by stavros »

jappgar wrote: post #165
stavros wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never look at code. It used to be that it quickly became unmaintainable spaghetti where the agent struggled to make any change at all, but in the past year (and with a three step plan/develop/review workflow), the quality is so good that I basically just don't look at the code any more. It definitely has fewer bugs than a senior developer, but it really hinges on getting the plan right. 20 minutes of planning and 2…

20 minutes planning, 20 minutes coding, 200 minutes review and refactor (includes going for a walk and thinking about the problem deeply). I know a lot of engineers who skip the last part. They're over confident in their original plan. They're over confident the agent actually fulfilled the plan.

You aren't treating this as a question of ROI. Is it worth spending 5x as much to make sure the plan was OK and implemented well? Or is it actually OK if we discover the bug during testing?

The answer won't be the same for all software, but you're assuming it will be.

Re: Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card

#170

Post by pbjerkeseth »

wyre wrote: post #65
pbjerkeseth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built/am building something similar, but I spent the first half of my tech career as a UI/UX designer before becoming a software engineer and I'd _like_ to think it shows, but there is something about designing-in-code with agents that leads to homogenous outputs if you don't spend equal time on visual design as on the technical parts. I'm a bit anxious about putting myself out there, but I'd be curious if my ef…

Looks great. I can tell you put a lot of time and energy into making it look good. I think a lot of the problems with the homogenous outputs of front-end design wouldn't be such a problem if the models naturally make their designs so much simpler, but they are LLM's so they are always going to be overly verbose. I was curious so I had asked my agent to redesign and recreate your front page for comparison and it gave…

Ha, it obviously picked up on the ouija board concept with the colors and copy. I think the detail expansion shown is a great illustration of another thing they tend to do - uncanny valley of 'sky is blue' type product descriptive copy that reminds me of dribbble shots or landing page template demos from a few years ago. Technically correct language that doesn't communicate much emotionally.
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