Introduction — Kandown docs

Kandown drops a tasks/ folder into your project and gives you three ways to work with it: a polished web board, a full terminal UI, and a scriptable CLI. All three read and write the same plain Markdown files.

There is no server to run, no database to migrate, no account to create and no sync service to trust. If you can read a folder of text files, you can read your board.

Tip

Prefer to poke at it first? The web app runs the real application in your browser with no login. It opens on a sample project that resets on reload. In a compatible browser, choose Open project to work directly with a local Kandown folder.

The three ideas

Your data is just files

One .md file per task, one folder, versioned in git. Nothing to export because nothing was ever imported. Open a task in your editor, grep your backlog, write a shell script against it, hand the folder to a colleague — it is all the same operation on the same files.

There is no index, no cache and no manifest. The directory is the state. Move a file between folders and the board moves with it; delete one and the task is gone. That constraint is enforced deliberately across the codebase — see Architecture.

Agents are first-class users

Most tools bolt AI on as an integration: an API key, a plugin, a webhook. Kandown assumes an agent is simply another user of the board, and gives it the same affordances as you.

kandown work prints everything an agent needs — the rules, your project instructions, a live board digest, and the computed next actionable task — as Markdown on stdout. Every task command is non-interactive, JSON-capable and offline. See For AI agents.

Local-first, actually

The board runs from a small daemon bound to 127.0.0.1 with a per-project token. Task commands never touch the network. The web UI ships as a single self-contained HTML file you can open from anywhere, including from a USB stick on a machine with no internet.

What Kandown is not

Note

Being clear about the boundaries saves you evaluating it for the wrong job.

Not a team server. There is no realtime multiplayer, no permissions model and no hosted instance. Collaboration happens the way it does for the rest of your repo: through git.
Not a project-management suite. No burndown charts, no sprint ceremonies, no time tracking.
Not a hosted service. Nothing to sign up for, and nothing that can shut down and take your data with it.

Who it is for

Developers who already live in a repository and want their task list to live there too — and anyone running AI coding agents who needs a shared, durable place for those agents to pick up work, report on it, and hand it back.