AgentFlow

Overview

AgentFlow turns your existing Kanban board into a fully autonomous AI development pipeline. Instead of building custom orchestration infrastructure, it treats your project management tool (Asana, GitHub Projects, Linear) as a distributed state machine — tasks move through stages, AI agents read and write state via comments, and humans intervene through the same UI they already use.

The result is complete pipeline observability from your phone, recoverable task state (state lives in your PM tool, not in memory), and human override at any point by dragging a card.

When to Use This Skill

• Use when you need to orchestrate multiple Claude Code workers across a full development lifecycle (build, review, test, integrate)
• Use when you want deterministic quality gates (tsc/eslint/tests) before AI review on AI-generated code
• Use when you want full pipeline visibility from your Kanban board or phone
• Use when running a solo or team project that needs autonomous task dispatch with cost tracking
• Use when you need orchestration designed to recover after session restarts

Core Concepts

7-Stage Kanban Pipeline

Tasks flow through: Backlog, Research, Build, Review, Test, Integrate, Done. Each stage has specific gates. The Kanban board IS the orchestration layer — no separate database, no message queue, no custom infrastructure.

Stateless Orchestrator

A crontab-driven one-shot sweep runs every 15 minutes. No daemon, no session dependency. If it crashes, the next sweep picks up where it left off because all state lives in your PM tool.

Deterministic Before Probabilistic

Hard gates (tsc + eslint + tests) run before any AI review, catching detectable errors before the more expensive review; coverage and cost must be measured. AI review comes after, as a second layer.

Adversarial Review

An independent review should report only substantiated findings and incomplete coverage. Do not require an arbitrary number of flaws or fabricate issues to pass a gate.

Transitive Priority Dispatch

Tasks that unblock the most downstream work get built first, automatically computing the critical path.

Prerequisites and authorization

This AAS tree contains the guide only. Slash commands, cron script, worker runtime, board integration and templates named below belong to the separately reviewed upstream installation; do not claim they exist locally. Verify a fixed upstream revision, license, schemas and setup first. Creating board tasks/comments, spawning workers, configuring schedules, paid model calls, merging and publishing each require the user's applicable authorization. Preserve existing host files and use the current repository maintainer gates.

For concurrent workers, require atomic task claims or leases, disjoint write ownership, bounded concurrency and verified artifact SHAs. A stale heartbeat does not prove a worker stopped; prevent duplicate paid jobs or writes before reassignment.

Skills / Commands

/spec-to-board

Decomposes a SPEC.md into atomic tasks on your Kanban board with dependencies mapped.

/sdlc-orchestrate

Dispatches tasks to workers based on transitive priority and conflict detection. Runs as a crontab sweep.

/sdlc-worker --slot <N>

Runs a worker in a terminal slot that picks up tasks, builds code, and creates PRs. Run 3-4 workers in parallel.

/sdlc-health

Real-time pipeline status dashboard showing current stage, assigned agent, retry count, and accumulated cost for every task.

/sdlc-stop

Graceful shutdown: active workers finish their current task, unstarted tasks return to Backlog.

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Write Your Spec

Create a SPEC.md for your project describing what you want to build.

2. Decompose Into Tasks

claude -p "/spec-to-board"

This reads your SPEC.md, decomposes it into atomic tasks, maps dependencies, and creates them on your Kanban board.

3. Start Workers

Open 3-4 terminal windows, each as a worker slot:

# Terminal 2 — Builder
claude -p "/sdlc-worker --slot T2"

# Terminal 3 — Builder
claude -p "/sdlc-worker --slot T3"

# Terminal 4 — Reviewer
claude -p "/sdlc-worker --slot T4"

# Terminal 5 — Tester
claude -p "/sdlc-worker --slot T5"

4. Start the Orchestrator

# Add to crontab (runs every 15 minutes)
crontab -e
# Add: */15 * * * * ~/.claude/sdlc/agentflow-cron.sh >> /path/to/private/agentflow-orchestrate.log 2>&1

5. Monitor and Intervene

Open your Kanban board on your phone. Watch tasks flow through the pipeline. Drag any card to "Needs Human" to intervene. Run /sdlc-health for a terminal dashboard.

6. Stop the Pipeline

claude -p "/sdlc-stop"

Quality Gates

Each stage enforces specific gates before promotion:

• Build to Review: tsc + eslint + npm test must all pass (deterministic)
• Review to Test: Evidence-based review resolves blocking findings and records coverage
• Test to Integrate: 80%