Kanban Board Management & Task Lifecycle (Kanban Workflow)

This class-level skill provides a comprehensive playbook for both Kanban Orchestrators (who decompose and route tasks) and Kanban Workers (who carry out tasks and report outcomes).

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1. Kanban Orchestrator — Decomposition Playbook

Decompose, route, and summarize — that's the whole job of an orchestrator.

When to use the board (vs. just doing the work)

Create Kanban tasks when any of these are true:

1. Multiple specialists are needed. Research + analysis + writing is three profiles.
2. The work should survive a crash or restart. Long-running, recurring, or important.
3. The user might want to interject. Human-in-the-loop at any step.
4. Multiple subtasks can run in parallel. Fan-out for speed.
5. Review / iteration is expected. A reviewer profile loops on drafter output.
6. The audit trail matters. Board rows persist in SQLite forever.

If none of those apply — it's a small one-shot reasoning task — use delegate_task instead or answer the user directly.

The Anti-Temptation Rules

• Do not execute the work yourself.
• For any concrete task, create a Kanban task and assign it. Every single time.
• If no specialist fits, ask the user which profile to create. Do not default to doing it yourself under "close enough."

Specialist Roster

• researcher: Reads sources, gathers facts, writes findings.
• analyst: Synthesizes, ranks, de-dupes. Consumes researcher outputs.
• writer: Drafts prose in the user's voice.
• reviewer: Reads output, leaves findings, gates approval.
• backend-eng / frontend-eng: Writes code.
• ops: Runs scripts, manages services, handles deployments.
• pm: Writes specs, acceptance criteria.

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2. Kanban Worker — Pitfalls and Examples

Workers execute tasks assigned page by page, adhering to tenant boundaries and heartbeats.

Workspace Handling

• scratch: Fresh temp directory. Read/write freely; it gets cleaned up on completion.
• dir:<path>: Shared persistent directory. Treat like persistent state.
• worktree: Git worktree at the resolved directory path. Commit work here.

Tenant Isolation

If $HERMES_TENANT is set, prefix memory entries with the tenant identifier to prevent leakage across namespaces (e.g. business-a: ...).

Heartsbeats, Block Reasons, and CLI Fallbacks

• Heartsbeats should name progress: "epoch 12/50, loss 0.31".
• Block reasons should be short, distinct, and accompanied by detailed comments.
• CLI equivalents (hermes kanban complete ...) exist for operating from standard shell sessions. Use native python tools where available.

References & Sub-playbooks

• references/kanban-workflow.md — Roster conventions and task decomposition guidelines
• references/kanban-workflow.md — Scenarios, pitfalls, and edge cases for Kanban execution agents