Switch from Vibe Kanban to Task Machine

Vibe Kanban is an open-source kanban board for orchestrating AI coding agents: plan issues and sub-issues, assign tasks to agents, run several in parallel across git worktrees, review the diffs in a built-in viewer, and track status against PR activity. It is good at exactly that job. Task Machine is a durable operating layer for human and agent work of any kind — coding is one execution environment among several — with recurring work reviewed from one inbox. People rarely switch because Vibe Kanban failed them. They switch because most of their work was never code. Bloop, the company behind it, shut the product down in April 2026 and handed the project to community maintainers — which for many teams is itself the reason to move recurring work somewhere with a company behind it.

Why do people switch from Vibe Kanban?

• Work that isn't code has nowhere to go. Outreach, client reports, content, and support don't fit a board built around worktrees and PRs. Task Machine tasks carry any kind of work, and the playbook catalog — 123 playbooks across 17 categories — covers operations well beyond engineering.
• Review beyond the diff. A diff viewer reviews code. Task Machine's approval and question steps review any consequential output — a draft email, a report, a plan — from one shared inbox, with verifier steps checking work before it reaches you.
• Recurring work, not just queued tasks. A card runs once. Task Machine runs deterministic, verifiable workflows on schedules, with the same steps in the same order and step-level run history on every run.
• Three surfaces instead of a board. The three-surface workflow (chat, inbox, tasks) lets you fan work out from chat, approve from the inbox, and open a task only when the detail matters.

What maps to what?

What do you give up?

Vibe Kanban is more focused and mature for parallel coding-agent execution and code review today, and it is open source (Apache 2.0), so you can run it yourself for free. If your whole job is shipping code through many agents in parallel, it is ahead on that job. The work worth moving is the recurring business work around the code — the reports, outreach, and operations a coding board was never meant to hold.

How does the switch work?

1. Separate the work: parallel coding-agent execution can stay on the board. Recurring business work and anything needing structured approval are the candidates.
2. Join the Task Machine waitlist, connect the accounts that work touches, and pick playbooks that match the jobs.
3. Rebuild each candidate as a workflow with agent steps, an approval step where you want the final say, and a verifier step where quality has to be checked.
4. Run a cycle, compare against how you handled it before using the step-level run history, then retire the manual version.

Common questions

Can Task Machine run coding work too?

Yes. Coding is one execution environment among several, and agents run on machines you connect — local workers today, cloud workers later. Task Machine just isn't organized around worktrees and PRs the way Vibe Kanban is.

Can I use both?

Plenty of people do: Vibe Kanban for parallel coding-agent delivery, Task Machine for the recurring operations around it. They solve different jobs.

Do agents act without my approval?

Only where you allow it. Each agent has an autonomy level, the default routes consequential actions to your inbox, and token and money budgets alert you at 80% and 100%.