The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2025–2026
Bloop's Vibe Kanban turns managing AI coding agents into a kanban board
Instead of another agent, Bloop built the planning-and-review layer: kanban cards dispatch coding agents into isolated workspaces while engineers review.
Bloop
What it had to solve
Bloop's engineers noticed the bottleneck had moved: coding agents worked autonomously in two-to-five-minute bursts, and humans either sat idle watching or drifted away. Running several agents at once made coordination worse, so the team built a kanban interface around the agents, dogfooded it for a few weeks, and open-sourced it in July 2025.
How it works
Vibe Kanban began with a mundane frustration: Louis Knight-Webb felt useless working synchronously with coding agents. Each task took two to five minutes, and while the agent worked he either sat idle or slid into doomscrolling. The fix was not a better agent but a different division of labour — run several agents in the background and give the human planning and review to do in the meantime.
The product translates that insight into a familiar form. Work is planned as kanban issues; when a card is ready, a workspace is created where a coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Amp, Cursor and others — executes on its own branch with a terminal and dev server. Diffs return to the same UI for inline comments and feedback, a built-in browser previews the result, and agents can write their own tickets through the board's MCP server, so even planning can be delegated.
Bloop, the startup behind the earlier Bloop code-search tool, open-sourced Vibe Kanban in July 2025 after a few weeks of internal dogfooding. Its Show HN of 11 July 2025 drew 195 points and 132 comments; engineers debated whether AI output was ready for parallel flows, whether a kanban board was the right surface, and how to review an avalanche of pull requests — exactly the question the tool was built around.
Adoption ran ahead of the company. The repository reached 28k stars and 3k forks, and by April 2026 Bloop announced it was shutting down because thousands of daily users were almost all on the free tier. Vibe Kanban itself continued as a community-maintained open-source project — an unusually honest ending for a tool whose premise outlived its business.
Why it lands
- The insight inverted the product: since agents already write code, the scarce human resource is planning and review, so the interface around agents — not another agent — became the tool.
- A kanban card is a ready-made unit of work: it gives an agent a bounded task, gives the human a queue to prioritise, and turns parallel agents from chaos into a reviewable pipeline.
- Isolated workspaces with a branch, terminal and dev server let several agents run at once without clobbering each other, which made parallelism safe enough to trust.
- A few weeks of dogfooding plus one-command open source (npx vibe-kanban) turned distribution into a developer habit, and the board reached 28k stars.
- The ending is instructive too: adoption without a paid tier proved the workflow while the company could not monetise it, and the tool survived as community open source.
What it did
The Show HN of 11 July 2025 drew 195 points and 132 comments, and the debate showed the bet landing: engineers argued about whether parallel agents were trustworthy and how to review the flood of pull requests. The repository showed 28k stars and 3k forks when this material was collected, and Bloop's shutdown note later credited Vibe Kanban with shipping multi-agent support, diff commenting, live preview, click-to-edit and remote access first.
What you can take
When AI automates the doing, the product opportunity moves to the interface around it: the engineer's scarce time is planning and review, so the board that organises agents became the product.
Since then
On 10 April 2026 Bloop announced it was shutting down: thousands of engineers used Vibe Kanban daily, but nearly all were free users and the team could not find a business model it was excited about. The project would continue as open-source and community maintained; remote services retired within 30 days, invoices were refunded, and local workspaces kept working. The note claimed the team shipped multi-agent support, diff commenting, live preview, click-to-edit and remote access first. The repository still displays the sunsetting banner.
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