istosandClaude Opus 5
d94b6ee423
An agent that exits non-zero was the least-handled outcome on the board: one ticker line that scrolled away, a card that looked exactly as it did before the launch, and the log's contents — usually the whole story — left on disk. Three launches died in an API outage and the board said nothing a person would notice. So the outcome is recorded on the run: exit code, ended-at, and the cleaned tail of its log as the excerpt (a launch that died before the agent spoke says so rather than showing blank). From that the card takes the alarm border and a `run failed` pill, with the excerpt on hover and in full in the card sheet; a toast fires, because failures are rare and actionable; and the ticker line stays, now naming what the log ended on. Every headless kind lands in _finish, so work, act-pr, PR review and the relevance check are all covered. The state is scoped to the run and the stage: the next launch supersedes it, and the watcher drops it when the card moves, so nothing follows a card into review/. The way is cleared for the relaunch too: a failed run with no commits has its worktree and empty branch removed — the reasoning a decline already uses — so ▸ start work works without a hand `git worktree remove`. A failed run with commits keeps its worktree. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Bench
A live kanban for coding-agent work: task files in stage directories are
the only source of truth; a stdlib-only board narrates everything that
happens to them — agents working in git worktrees, PRs opening on review,
CI and Copilot state on the cards, drives of the app from a task's own
branch, and an archive that is never a delete. Turn on team mode
(BOARD_SYNC=1) and the truth is origin/main: moves commit and push
themselves, every board pulls on a beat, and the person who claimed a
card first keeps it.
Install into a repo
mkdir .task-manager && curl -L \
https://github.com/12vectors/bench/releases/latest/download/bench.tar.gz \
| tar -xz -C .task-manager
./.task-manager/start.sh # wires the project (idempotent) and serves
No token, no clone: releases are curated artifacts that never contained bench's own cards or settings, so the board starts empty by construction.
Commit .task-manager/ into the host repo — core is vendored on purpose,
so clones work offline and updates show up in the host's own diffs.
The workflow brief ships as .task-manager/AGENTS.md — the cross-vendor
name coding agents read natively — with CLAUDE.md beside it as a one-line
compatibility pointer. Both live inside .task-manager/, so a host repo's
own root AGENTS.md is never touched.
Update
./.task-manager/update.sh # latest release
BENCH_REF=v2 ./.task-manager/update.sh # an exact release tag
The artifact is stamped with the repo it was built from, so updating
needs no configuration; BENCH_SOURCE=<owner/repo> in
manager/local/.env overrides the stamp. Updates replace
manager/core/ and the top-level scripts wholesale and touch nothing
else — tasks, plans, reference, and everything under manager/local/
(your driver, commands, prompt overrides, settings, state) survive every
update. Then python3 .task-manager/install.py and restart the board.
If the source repo has no published release yet, update.sh says so and
changes nothing.
Working on bench itself
git clone git@github.com:12vectors/bench.git && cd bench && ./start.sh
A clone carries bench's own cards and local/ content — that is dev mode,
not an install. (Installing from a clone anyway works: install.py
clears the shipped cards on its first boot in a host repo.) Releases are
built by ./release.sh from the manifest at
manager/core/release-manifest: tag = v<VERSION>, one stable asset
name (bench.tar.gz), contents at the tarball root — the two things the
install one-liner above depends on.
The three-layer law
Core knows about tasks, worktrees, PRs and events. It knows nothing about
any particular app (drivers do: local/driver/start), agent vendor
(adapters do: core/adapters/), or project (local/ does). Full docs in
AGENTS.md; the adapter contract in manager/core/adapters/README.md.
License
MIT.