Wrongstack Kanban

WrongStack Kanban

What the board is for

The board tells whoever picks the work up what is in flight, what it depends on, and what already happened. It is a record, not a checkpoint. Put substantial or multi-step work on it so the state outlives the session; a trivial edit, a quick read, or a question does not need a card. Resume the existing card for the same request instead of creating a duplicate.

The board follows the work; the work does not wait on the board. If Kanban persistence fails, say so and keep working — do not stall.

If board or card identity is unclear, call kanban with action workbench first. Its Now / Next / Blocked / Review lanes and alerts are navigation over authoritative boards; follow the selected card back to its board before mutating it, and never treat the Workbench projection as a second task store.

Proportional hierarchy

• A genuinely atomic request is one childless leaf card. It does not need invented children.
• Composite work is a parent plus dependency-ordered children created with the kanban action split_atomic. Only a parent marked atomic: true needs childTaskIds.
• Scale card count to the size of the work. Never let card bookkeeping become the task.

Card detail

What a managed board actually enforces before a card leaves Backlog:

dueDate, labels, priority and estimatedHours are available and used when set, but not required — a thirty-line fix has no genuine deadline, and demanding one only teaches you to invent a date to clear the gate. The Kanban Cleaner still lists them as advisory suggestions; that is not a block.

Fill what is genuinely known. A thin card beats untracked work, and the rest is filled in as it becomes known.

Anti-fake-progress rules

1. Never claim a task is done in chat without a board mutation. If you completed work, call kanban with mark_assignment or transition_task to persist it. A chat-only completion claim is fake progress.
2. Never mark a task completed without verification. On a managed board mark_assignment(completed) moves the card to Review — it does not complete it.
3. Never skip lifecycle stages. Managed cards move exactly one stage at a time. The guard rejects jumps.
4. Never report work as in progress without a board assignment. If work is happening, the card must carry an active assignment with lease metadata.
5. Never shrink tracked scope by omission. Todo, task and plan rows are identity-bearing projections of Kanban cards. Keep every unfinished row and its kanbanBoardId/kanbanTaskId binding in full-list updates.

Dispatch contract

1. Dispatch is deterministic. Selection is by priority, column, order and creation time — child cards before composite parents. Do not try to influence it by shuffling tasks or boards.
2. Claim before working. Call kanban with claim_task (or let the Director's queue tool claim for you) before starting. Working an unclaimed card means another agent may be working it too.
3. Heartbeat or lose the lease. Call kanban with heartbeat_assignment before the lease expires. Expired leases are recovered by the supervisor and the task is returned to the queue for reassignment.
4. Fence your writes. Pass expectedLeaseId on every mark_assignment and heartbeat_assignment. If your lease was recovered, the write becomes a safe no-op instead of corrupting the successor's state.

Completion contract

1. "Done" means verified. The completion gate runs the verifier, which executes success-criteria checks deterministically — tests and commands are actually run, not asserted.
2. Chat evidence is not board evidence. Saying "tests pass" verifies nothing. The verifier runs the real command and records the result.
3. File scope is checked. When expectedFileChanges is set, the verifier compares the actual git diff against the expected paths. Unexpected changes fail the scope check.
4. Acceptance depends on board policy. When verification passes, a managed board auto-accepts Review → Done by default. A board that sets lifecycle.autoAccept: false holds the card in Review for an explicit reviewer transition_task. Either way, a failing or absent verdict never reaches Done on its own.