Kanban board app for your own work, built with AI

Why personal kanban works

A to-do list tells you what exists; a board tells you what state each thing is in. Seeing six cards stacked in "Doing" is a sharper signal than six unticked lines, and that visual pressure is the whole method. Most people who drift away from kanban do so because their board grew too many columns or because nothing stopped cards piling up in the middle. A good board app is built to resist both.

The parts of a board worth specifying

Columns: Three to five is enough for one person: Backlog, Next, Doing, Done is a solid start. Let the user rename and reorder them, but not add a dozen.
Work-in-progress limit: A number on the Doing column, say three. When it's reached, the column header turns a warning colour and a new card can't be dropped there without a deliberate override.
Cards: A title, an optional note, a due date and one or two labels. Anything more and adding a card becomes a chore, which defeats the point.
Moving cards: Drag and drop with a mouse or finger, and keyboard moves for everyone else: select a card, then use arrow keys or a Move menu. Drag-only boards lock out keyboard and screen-reader users.
Done column: It fills up quickly. An Archive action, or auto-hiding cards finished more than two weeks ago, keeps it readable.
Swimlanes: Optional horizontal rows, such as Work and Home. Useful for one person with two lives; skip them if you only have one kind of task.

Describing it to Anticode

Give the model your actual columns and a rule or two: "A kanban board for my freelance work with columns Inbox, This week, Doing (limit 2), Waiting on client and Done. Cards have a client label and a due date. Overdue cards show a red edge. Done cards older than 14 days move to an archive I can search." The Architect turns that into a plan and asks up to three questions where it matters, for example whether you want swimlanes or a compact view for your phone.

The model writes the board as one HTML document with plain JavaScript, so drag and drop, the limit check and the archive all run in the page. It's asked to make every control labelled and keyboard operable and to work from a 360-pixel phone up, which matters for a board: on a narrow screen, columns usually become a horizontal swipe or a single column with a picker. If you have a preference, say which.

If you're thinking of it as a Trello clone, describe the behaviour you rely on rather than naming the product: the model is told to capture how a reference feels in an original design, not to copy its name, logo or layout.

Where your cards are kept

The app saves the board to your browser's local storage, so it's there when you come back tomorrow on the same device and browser. That's private and works with no account, but it has consequences you should know before you move your whole life into it.

One device. Open the board on your phone and it's empty, because the phone's browser has its own storage.
Clearing the browser clears the board. Private windows and some cleaning tools wipe local storage.
A few megabytes. Plenty for thousands of text cards; not for attachments, which the app can't store anyway.

Two features soften this, and you can ask for both: an Export button that saves the board as a JSON file, and an Import that reads it back. That gives you a manual backup and a way to move between devices. Ask for a visible "Saved on this device" note, too, so you're never surprised.

What a team board needs that this isn't

A shared board needs accounts, a server that holds the cards and a way to tell everyone's screen that a card moved. Anticode apps run in a sandbox with no network, so none of that is possible inside one: no inviting colleagues, no assignees who get notified, no comments, no activity history visible to others. A board shown to someone else is a fresh, separate board on their device.

If you need the shared version, a dedicated project tool is the practical answer. If you're building that tool as a product, the board can still be a useful project management prototype for testing the layout with sample data before you commit to a backend, and the app build exports to Next.js with sign-in and Postgres as a starting point for a developer.

Limits in short

No sharing, assignees, comments or notifications.
No sync between devices except export and import by hand.
No file attachments; links to files are fine as plain text or links.
No reminders that arrive when the page is closed.

For a simpler list without columns, see the to-do list app. For dates on a line rather than cards in columns, a project timeline suits better.

Questions people ask

Can I use the board offline?

Once it has loaded, the board's logic runs in the page and saves locally, so moving cards doesn't need a connection. Opening it fresh still needs the page to load.

Can I change the columns later?

Yes. Ask for the change in a sentence, such as "add a Review column before Done with a limit of 3", and the build updates. Earlier versions stay in the version history.

Will my existing cards survive a rebuild?

Cards live in your browser, not in the code, so they stay as long as the app keeps reading the same saved format. Export a backup before a big change to how cards are structured.