A Kanban board where nobody moves a card
Open a project, tick one stage in its own board, and the card follows the note.
Built 2026-06-23 · Filmed 2026-10-23
Nobody moves these cards. Each one is a note in a folder, and its lane, its progress and the flag that says it needs me are read from what the note says.
- A made-up notebook30invented notes, projects and drafts, sorted into 6 lanes with no one dragging anything
- Waiting on a person4found in the notes' own text: a decision left open, a comment typed into a note, two blockers
- One tick2 to 3of 6 stages: one checkbox changed in one note, and the card's count followed it
Exhibit 1Open a project and see its own board
A short clip (0:52). Opening a project replaces the board with that project's own, drawn from its roadmap file. Ticking a stage there rewrites the note, and the card on the all-work board follows.
What to notice: the lanes are In progress and Up next because of the boxes in the note. Ticking the in-progress stage empties that lane and the card's count goes up by one.
Exhibit 2What each card is read from
| On the card | Read from |
|---|---|
| The lane | The note's own status line for a project; for a draft, the folder it sits in. |
| The progress count | The checkboxes in the project's roadmap file. A stage with sub-stages counts as one. |
| Next action and blocker | The two labelled lines in the project's status file. |
| Waiting on me | A blocker line, a comment typed between double braces in a note, or a phase marked as an open decision. |
| Agent sessions today | The session entries an agent wrote into the note's frontmatter, grouped by day. |
The tick in the clip, as the note itself changed (the demo project's roadmap file, before and after):
- [~] **photo-attachments** - [x] **photo-attachments**
What this does not show. The notebook is invented for the film: 30 notes made up to look like a maker's notebook, not mine, and no real project, person or client appears on any frame. The all-work cards read a feed that is rebuilt after the note changes; a commit alone left the old count on the card when I tried it, so in the clip a small script commits the note and then runs the board's rebuild, where in normal use an agent session's own write-back does it. The board's comment box is not shown either: in the current design a comment typed there goes to a separate comment service, which a second copy of the board could not be pointed at without changing its code. On a phone the board does not fit yet: six lanes side by side and a side panel wider than the screen, so there is no phone version.
The board was redesigned afterwards. The same notes under the old and the new version are on their own card.
The filmThe board over the made-up notebook
The film (1:04, narrated in my voice, English or Português) opens on the board, picks one card and counts its checkboxes, then opens the Needs-You inbox, which gathers what waits on a person across every project, and the Today view, where 4 agent sessions report what they touched.
The board holds no state of its own about where a card sits. It reads the notes. A lane and a progress count come from the frontmatter, the checkboxes and the status lines, and a ticked stage writes only that one checkbox. That is why it can sit over a folder of plain markdown that other tools and agents keep editing: there is no second copy of the state to keep in step.
What doesn't come across on video: a stage ticked in the project view is written to the note at once and the project's own board redraws from it, but the cards on the all-work board catch up only when the feed is rebuilt, so for a moment the two views can disagree.