Tutorial 23: Kanban — Multi-Agent Board

This is part of the Hermes Agent official tutorial series. View all tutorials

Imagine a whiteboard in a shared office where several coworkers can pin sticky notes, move them around, and write comments — except the coworkers are AI agents, and the whiteboard never gets erased. That’s Hermes Kanban: a durable task board that lets multiple named agents collaborate without fragile hand-offs or lost work.

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Step 1: Understand the Big Idea

Kanban is a shared database (a single file at ~/.hermes/kanban.db) that every Hermes profile can read and write. Each task is a row. Each handoff is a row. Each worker is a full OS process with its own identity and memory.

Key difference from delegate_task:

• delegate_task is like a phone call — you call, you wait, you hang up. If it fails, it’s gone.
• Kanban is like a bulletin board — you post a task, walk away, and anyone can pick it up later. If a worker crashes, the task stays and another agent can reclaim it.

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Step 2: Meet the Two Front Doors

Both surfaces use the same database, so they never disagree.

Door 1 — Agents use tools.
The AI model talks to the board through a dedicated toolset: kanban_show, kanban_list, kanban_create, kanban_complete, kanban_block, kanban_comment, and more. The dispatcher gives these tools to every worker automatically.

Door 2 — You use the CLI.
You (or scripts, or cron jobs) use hermes kanban … in the terminal, /kanban … as a slash command, or the dashboard.

Rule of thumb: if there’s a model behind it, use tools. If it’s a human or automation, use the CLI.

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Step 3: Try the Basic Commands

Here’s how you create and manage a task from the terminal:

# Create a new task
hermes kanban create "Write blog post" --assign researcher-1

# List all tasks
hermes kanban list

# Show details of a task
hermes kanban show 42

# Mark a task as done
hermes kanban complete 42

# Block a task (waiting on something)
hermes kanban block 42 "Need more data"

# Unblock it later
hermes kanban unblock 42

# Add a comment
hermes kanban comment 42 "Draft is ready for review"

Every CLI verb has a matching tool call the model uses internally — same database, same result.

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Step 4: See What Kanban Can Do That delegate_task Can’t

Here are the workloads this board is built for:

• Research triage — several researchers work in parallel, an analyst reviews, a writer drafts. A human can comment and unblock at any point.
• Scheduled ops — a daily brief agent that builds a journal over weeks.
• Digital twins — persistent assistants like inbox-triage that accumulate memory over time.
• Engineering pipelines — decompose a big feature, implement in parallel worktrees, review, iterate, then create a PR.
• Fleet work — one specialist managing 50 social accounts or 12 monitored services.

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Step 5: Remember the One-Sentence Distinction

delegate_task is a fork-join RPC call; Kanban is a durable message queue with a state machine.
In plain English: delegate_task is “ask and wait,” Kanban is “post and let the team work.”

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Summary

Kanban turns Hermes from a single-agent assistant into a multi-agent workforce with a shared, persistent memory. Tasks survive crashes, humans can step in anytime, and multiple agents can touch the same task over its life. It’s the difference between hiring a temp and building a team.

Next up: Tutorial 24 — Kanban in Action: Four Real-World Workflows. We’ll walk through a solo dev, a fleet farmer, a role pipeline with retry, and a circuit breaker pattern — with dashboard screenshots.