Contrib.social

Switch to using agents for minikanban running

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 8 May 2025, 9 days ago

Problem/Motivation

There are a number of limitations of the current minikanban agent runner:

  • It is using legacy JSON based output, but Agents 1.1.x now supports much more reliable function calling.
  • It only supports generation of tasks, but there may be some tasks already created that we want to manage.
  • It only supports tasks for AI agents, but some projects might want to blend AI and human tasks.
  • It only handled sequential linear dependencies (i.e. tasks are always blocked on the previous task), but project may have tasks that can be run parallel, or multiple blockers for a single ticket.
  • There's a lot of hardcoded control around all of this.
  • There is very little control over the resulting status of a task - if the LLM doesn't hit an error, the task is marked as done. If it does hit an error, it's marked as blocked.

Proposed resolution

We should switch to agents and function calls!

  • 📌 Add function calls for epics & tasks Active introduces function calls for listing and managing both epics and tasks, so agents now have all the data and actions they need available.
  • Task management for epic should use a config agent (with a default provided) which can manage existing tasks, create news tasks, and manage the dependencies between them.
  • Task execution should be simplified into a direct agent execution.
  • Both epics and tasks should have a "post execution" step that will allow the LLM to update the status of the ticket.

User interface changes

None.

API changes

Refactor all the things, but no public API changes!

Data model changes

None.

Potential future enhancements this paves the way for

  • Task management being a repeated action, rather than a one off.
  • Move from tokens to context definitions that can be varied on the context of the calling agent (possibly permission?)
📌 Task
Status

Active

Version

1.0

Component

Code

Created by

🇬🇧United Kingdom andrewbelcher

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