Donn's websites for Clay›Research brief
Published May 30, 2026
Kanban × Hermes Agent

Stop starting. Start finishing.

Kanban is a practical way to make work visible, limit overload, and improve flow. Inside Hermes Agent, it becomes a durable coordination board for multiple AI profiles, human review, retries, and long-running workflows.

01 / General idea

Kanban is a pull system for visible, limited, continuously improving work.

Origin story

Kanban began in the Toyota Production System. A downstream step used a card or signal to request more parts only when it had capacity or demand. That “pull” mechanism helped Toyota reduce waste, avoid overproduction, and improve flow.

Knowledge-work translation

In software, operations, research, and administrative work, Kanban manages invisible inventory: tasks, requests, bugs, drafts, approvals, and projects. The board is not the point; the point is seeing the system clearly enough to improve it.

Inbox Ready In progress Review Done
Plain English: Kanban helps you stop pushing every idea into motion at once. It asks: what work exists, what is actually ready, what is in progress, what is blocked, and what can be finished next?
02 / Practices

A Kanban board only becomes useful when it changes behavior.

1

Visualize the workflow

Make the real workflow visible, not the idealized one. Include blocked, review, and waiting states if those are where work actually lives.

2

Limit WIP

Work-in-progress limits force prioritization and reveal bottlenecks. Without WIP limits, a board often becomes a prettier overload list.

3

Manage flow

Watch lead time, cycle time, throughput, blocked time, and aging work. Optimize for finished, verified outcomes rather than busy people.

4

Make policies explicit

Define what “ready,” “blocked,” “reviewed,” and “done” mean. The policy is how the board becomes trustworthy.

5

Use feedback loops

Review replenishment, delivery, service quality, and operations regularly. Kanban is meant to evolve through small experiments.

6

Improve collaboratively

Start where you are. Do not impose a perfect process. Use the board to expose reality, then adjust the system.

03 / Hermes Agent

Hermes Kanban turns Kanban into a durable multi-agent work queue.

What it is

Hermes Agent's Kanban feature is a SQLite-backed board for coordinating named Hermes profiles. It persists tasks, dependencies, comments, events, runs, worker handoffs, and completion metadata. Compared with a short-lived subagent call, Kanban gives the work a durable home.

When it matters

Use it for workflows that need fan-out/fan-in, restart safety, human intervention, specialist profiles, retries, review loops, or an inspectable audit trail.

Board

Persistent state

Tasks move through statuses like triage, todo, ready, running, blocked, done, and archived.

Dispatcher

Spawns workers

The gateway dispatcher claims ready assigned tasks, spawns the assignee profile, monitors heartbeats, detects crashes, reclaims stale work, and promotes children when parents complete.

Workers

Structured handoff

A worker reads its card, works in its workspace, then completes with a summary and metadata or blocks with a reason that a human or later worker can act on.

# Typical operator commands
hermes kanban init
hermes kanban create "research a buying decision" --assignee researcher
hermes kanban show t_abcd1234
hermes kanban comment t_abcd1234 "Use these sources too..."
hermes kanban unblock t_abcd1234
hermes kanban dispatch --max 3

Important implementation details

  • Default board: ~/.hermes/kanban.db; named boards live under ~/.hermes/kanban/boards/.
  • The dispatcher runs in the gateway by default, so the gateway needs to be alive for automatic task pickup.
  • Workers use kanban_* tools, not shell commands, so lifecycle actions stay scoped to the assigned task.
  • Dependencies are parent → child links. Children wait until parents are done before becoming ready.

Docs/code note

Local research found a likely docs/code drift around dashboard plugin authentication: one doc described unauthenticated local plugin routes, while current plugin code indicates dashboard token/session handling. Treat dashboard auth details as version-specific and verify before exposing anything beyond localhost.

04 / Why Clay might care

Kanban fits a proactive chief-of-staff agent because it makes agent work inspectable.

Research pipelines

Multiple researchers can run in parallel; a synthesis or writing task waits on their handoffs instead of relying on one giant prompt.

Human-in-the-loop control

Workers can block for approval, clarification, or review. A human can comment or unblock without losing the task trail.

Durable operations

Recurring or long-running work survives crashes and restarts. The board records attempts, errors, comments, and final metadata.

Specialist profiles

Different profiles can own research, coding, review, writing, or ops. Each can have narrower tools, model choices, and memory.

Better review loops

“Done” can mean “ready for review,” not “merged, emailed, or deployed.” That keeps risky actions gated.

Cross-channel continuity

A Discord or Telegram request can become a durable board item rather than disappearing into one conversation thread.

05 / Things to be careful of

The danger is not that agents cannot move cards. The danger is believing moved cards mean trustworthy outcomes.

A board alone is not Kanban

If there are no WIP limits, explicit policies, review gates, or flow checks, the board is just a task tracker with nicer columns.

Human review becomes the bottleneck

Ten fast agents can overload one human reviewer. Set WIP limits for agents and humans.

Unknown assignees stall work

Hermes orchestrators should discover real local profiles before assigning. Invented profile names can leave tasks ready but unspawned.

Dependencies must be real

Do not over-link tasks just because prose says “then.” But if a child truly depends on a parent, create the dependency at task creation time to avoid races.

Definition of done needs teeth

For agent work, “done” should often require tests, source citations, live URL verification, human approval, or deployment checks — not merely generated text.

Logs are sensitive

Comments, metadata, prompts, and worker logs can contain private context. Store summaries and pointers, not credentials, raw secrets, or unnecessary personal data.

Most useful beginner lesson: make uncertainty visible. Add states or policies for blocked, stale, failed, needs recovery, and ready for human review. A happy-path-only board becomes a false map.
06 / Starter policy

A sane way to start with Hermes Kanban.

Start small

  1. Create one board for a real recurring workflow.
  2. Use three or four states first: Ready, Running, Blocked, Done.
  3. Define “ready” and “done” in writing.
  4. Assign to real profiles only.
  5. Require workers to leave structured summaries and verification notes.
  6. Review aging work and blocked cards daily until the flow is boring.

Suggested card template

  • Goal: what valuable outcome should exist?
  • Definition of done: what proves it is complete?
  • Assignee + accountable human: who acts and who accepts?
  • Tools/access: web, repo, files, credentials, dashboard, etc.
  • Dependencies: parent tasks, inputs, blockers.
  • Risk: approvals needed before external side effects.
  • Verification: tests, citations, live URL, screenshot, diff, or human review.
  • Recovery: what to do if it stalls or fails.
07 / Sources

Sources and local references used for this brief.