The board

Every project has a kanban board: cards (issues) in columns. People and agents work the same board — from the app, from the modular CLI, from the kanbo command, or through an agent's board tools.

Seeing it#

• New → Kanban puts the board on the Space as a node. At 100% it is the full board; zoomed out it shows how many cards each column holds.
• The board also opens as an overlay, from a # search in the command palette, from a notification or from a card mentioned in a message.

Columns#

A new board starts with Backlog, To Do, In Progress, In Review, Done, Canceled. You can rename, add, reorder and remove columns, except To Do: it is the queue agents take their next card from.

A column can require something before a card enters it: a complete checklist, a linked pull request, green CI, or a person's approval. An agent is refused until the rule is met; a person can go through, with a warning.

The flow of a card#

• A card has a status line: one sentence on what is happening now.
• An agent that needs a decision waits for approval: it stops and the card says so. Only a person can approve or return a card.
• A card links to its pull request; Modular follows its state and CI and writes them on the card.
• Delegate a card to a Claude Code or Codex agent and it starts working on it, in its own git worktree. See Agents.

Cards also have comments, relations to other cards, milestones and sprints, and a history of every change.

Where a board is stored#

By default a project's board is in Modular's own database. It can live instead:

• in a file in the project (.kanbo/board.db), so it travels with the repository and the kanbo command can read it without Modular running;
• in Postgres, so several people or machines share it.

From a terminal#

modular issue prime                      # the board's columns and what each means
modular issue list
modular issue create --title "Terminal sleep after 5 minutes hidden"
modular issue move <card> "In Progress"
modular issue status-line set <card> --status-line "writing the migration"
modular issue wait-approval <card> --status-line "waiting on the storage decision"

kanbo … does the same directly on a board file. Inside Modular prefer modular issue: it goes through the app, which keeps everything on screen current.

An orchestrator instruction for a board shows one way to tell an agent how to work a card.