Durable memory and orchestration for coding agents

Agents forget. The board remembers.

Agents lose context. Teams of agents collide, duplicate work and leave half-finished branches behind. cliban gives them a durable local control plane: specs, plans, progress, dependencies, claims, decisions and reusable lessons live on one SQLite board and survive crashes, compaction and handoffs.

Install cliban →Get the agent skills

Hosted services required

0 one SQLite board

Every read is available as JSON.
Every mutation is atomic.
Every event is attributed.

Install cliban →

A lap around the boardscope · coordinate · observe · recover

Run cliban with no arguments for the board: five status columns, fuzzy search, milestone progress, projects, and an attributed activity feed.

The agent loopread · act · tick · log · resume

A fresh agent asks the board where it left off, not the git diff.

Press eedit → save → synchronized board

Any issue opens in $EDITOR as frontmatter plus Markdown. Save it and the card moves.

~/pulseDispatch in waves

cliban issue ls --ready --project PULSE
KEY      TITLE                                     STATUS   PRIORITY  MILESTONE       PARENT
PULSE-1  Cert expiry checks                        backlog  high      v1.0 hardening  -
PULSE-2  Status page themes                        backlog  low       v1.0 hardening  -
PULSE-3  Webhook notifications on state change     backlog  medium    v1.0 hardening  -
PULSE-8  Escalation chains with on-call rotations  backlog  high      v1.1 alerting   -
PULSE-9  Alert silences with expiry                backlog  medium    v1.1 alerting   -
cliban milestone waves --project PULSE "v1.1 alerting"
wave 1: PULSE-8, PULSE-9
wave 2: PULSE-10
wave 3: PULSE-11
cliban issue claim PULSE-8
claimed PULSE-8 by claude
cliban issue tick PULSE-4 --task 1 --step 3
ticked PULSE-4 Task 1 Step 3
cliban issue log PULSE-4 "pending state renders on the status page"
logged on PULSE-4: pending state renders on the status page

Human control plane

The board

Five columns, milestones, projects and every event, attributed to whoever made it: you or the agent.

Survives compaction

Specs, plans, claims and decisions live on the board, not in a context window. Crashes, compaction and handoffs lose nothing.

Edit one section, not the file

An issue is structured Markdown: Spec, Plan, Activity Log, Notes, Files. Agents replace one section and never touch the others.

Claims stop collisions

An agent claims a ticket before it starts. Nobody else picks it up, so two agents never build the same thing twice.

Dependency waves

Native blocking edges turn a milestone into waves. Everything in a wave is safe to run at once, one agent per ticket.

Lessons you can search

Project notes hold what the last agent learned, retrieved when it matters instead of dumped into every prompt.

Linear when you want it

Import assigned work, keep local plans and logs, push one living progress comment. Everything stays local until you connect.

The agent system

Ten skills ship with it

cliban teaches agents the complete, machine-readable CLI.
setup-cliban binds a repository to its board and injects live state into new sessions.
explore-feature turns a rough idea into an approved design.
scope-milestone grills the design, slices tracer-bullet tickets and records dependency edges.
triage-bug searches duplicates, reproduces the report and leaves an actionable ticket.
diagnose-issue proves the root cause and keeps the hypothesis ledger on the ticket.
complete-issue plans proportionally, implements, verifies and hands off one ticket.
complete-milestone dispatches one agent per ticket, in dependency waves and isolated worktrees.
recover-milestone reconstructs an interrupted run from board and git state.
cliban-workflow holds the shared artifact, status, git and recovery contract.

Why a board instead of a plan file?

A file remembers text. cliban remembers work: ownership, dependencies, atomic plan progress, searchable lessons and an attributed timeline.

A fresh agent can ask what is ready, what changed, what failed and where to resume, without rebuilding the answer from prose and git diffs. And it all stays on your machine.

~Two minutes to a board

brew install lioralabs/tap/cliban
cliban project add PROJ "My project"
created project PROJ (My project)
cliban issue add "First issue" --project PROJ
created PROJ-1: First issue
cliban

Source