Kanban

Kanban is a way of managing work by making it visible. A board holds columns; each column is a state of work; each card is one piece of work. Cards move left to right:

| To Do          | In Progress     | Done            |
|----------------|-----------------|-----------------|
| waiting work   | active work     | finished work   |

Two rules do most of the work:

1. Pull, don’t push. Nobody is handed work — whoever has capacity pulls the next card.
2. Limit work in progress. Few cards in flight at once means work finishes instead of piling up half-done.

That’s it. The board is the status report.

How Operator uses kanban

In Operator!, the cards are tickets and the workers are AI agents. Operator holds three internal states — todo, doing, done — and enforces both rules: agents pull the next ticket when a slot frees up, and parallelism limits cap work in progress.

You can run entirely from local tickets, or sync the board with an external kanban provider like Jira, Linear, or GitHub Projects — Operator maps its three states onto your board’s columns and moves cards as agents work.