Working outside the board

The board is for work you want agents to own, from plan to PR. Not everything fits that. Sometimes you fix a typo straight on main, pair with an agent in your editor, or open a PR yourself. kanbot is built to live alongside that.

Agent sessions in your repo

The agents and skills kanbot installs also work in normal Claude Code and Codex sessions. kanbot sync writes them in each tool's native format. So when you work locally, your agent:

• follows the same AGENTS.md, project-conventions and project-memory,
• can call the same subagents, such as explorer and test-writer,
• can file new ideas for the board with kanbot-idea,
• can maintain the kanbot setup with kanbot-admin.

Work done this way doesn't need a card. The board shows what you want agents to do, and git history shows what happened.

Your own PRs: the kanbot-review label

Want agent review on a PR you opened yourself? Add the kanbot-review label. You don't need a card.

The daemon then treats it like a kanbot PR in Review, with three differences:

• The PR description is the spec. There is no plan, so only the technical review runs. The acceptance review is skipped.
• Your comments are instructions. Comments and review threads from collaborators go to the fixer, which pushes commits to your branch.
• No card moves. When review is done, the PR gets agent-reviewed and you're notified.

Failing CI and merge conflicts are fixed too, as on kanbot PRs. Remove the label to stop. PRs from forks are skipped, because kanbot can't push to them.

Commits straight to the base branch

Push to main whenever you like. If that makes an open kanbot PR conflict, the fixer merges main in and resolves it. See Review.

Cards in Planning or Ready need nothing: agents always start from the latest base branch.

When to use what

You want to…	Do this
Hand off a whole piece of work	Card on the board
Get a quick fix in	Commit or PR yourself
Get agent review on your own PR	Add kanbot-review
Work with an agent at your side	Normal Claude Code or Codex session in the repo
Note an idea for later while working	Ask your agent to file it (kanbot-idea)
Teach agents something for every future job	Add a fact to project-memory