Agents Do Better When Work Lives on a Board

Most agent harnesses ship a todo list. Checkboxes in the chat, a side panel, something that looks like progress while the session is alive.

From my experience using AI heavily: relying on that internal list for a real workstream gets hard to manage and track. An external todo system is often easier to govern. The agent has also tended to do better when work is expressed as issues on the repo you’re in - plan the product as a project on a board, put goals and breakdown there, and let the agent pick cards instead of inventing a private backlog every session.

TL;DR: This is an observation, not a rule. Harness todos still help for short in-session steps. For longer arcs I’ve gotten more stable results when planning and ownership live outside the chat - preferably on the forge you already use for code.

What I’ve been doing

Create a project board for what you’re shipping (org-level if several repos share one product). Write the summary once: problem, goals, non-goals, constraints, what “done” means. Break that into issues with enough acceptance criteria that something can actually finish. Point the agent at the board - next Ready item, implement #142, triage bugs labeled for it. Land via PR. Reviews, CI failures, and product follow-ups go back to issues so the next turn (same agent or another) still has a durable queue.

Other project tools work - Linear, Jira, Notion, whatever your team already has. What I’ve noticed with native issues + projects next to the code is less glue: stable IDs (#142 survives chats), PRs and CI sit beside the task, humans and agents share one surface, and you spend fewer tokens re-explaining state every session. You’ve moved planning and management of what you’re building onto a board both of you can track, correlate, and pull context from.

Harness todos still have a job. Mid-issue micro-steps (“run tests,” “update the readme”) are fine as ephemeral checkboxes. They die with the session; the issue doesn’t. For a twenty-minute drive that never needs a second agent or a tomorrow-morning resume, the built-in list is often enough and a board is overhead.

This can be countered. If your work is small, solo, and finishes in one chat, external process is ceremony. If the board is theater - everything In progress, novel-length issues, no review - you just moved the mess. Some people keep a clean harness workflow and never miss a forge board. Fair. I’m not arguing universality. I’m saying for multi-session, multi-PR work, the durable queue has been the part that held up for me - and reviews still matter; the issues page is just a convenient attention surface when something needs a human or a second pass.

The agent still lives in the terminal (ideally a sandbox - How to Safely Give AI Agents a Terminal). The board is optional infrastructure for remembering what “done” was supposed to mean after the chat is gone.