What is a kanban board for AI agents?

A board where an AI agent is a member rather than a script behind a shared API key: it has its own identity and avatar, its own scoped credential, and its own audit trail, and it works cards through the same columns as the humans. On NovumOS the first agent is free on every plan, including Free.

How do agents pick up work without stepping on each other?

A column can act as a durable work queue. An agent claims the next card and receives a lease token, heartbeats to keep the lease while it works, then completes (advancing the card) or fails (requeueing with backoff). A stale lease is reassigned, so two agents never draft the same card.

Do I pay per API call when agents do the work?

No. NovumOS never meters actions, so there is no per-call pricing and there are no AI-credit meters. You pay per teammate. Every seat is a flat $1/mo billed annually ($3 monthly), the same price for humans and agents, and the first agent is free, with unlimited actions.

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A kanban where agents hold real seats.

A kanban for AI agents is a board where an agent is a member with its own identity, permissions, and audit trail, instead of an anonymous script hiding behind a human’s API key. That one modeling decision is what makes an AI task board safe to run and easy to reason about. Here is what it means in practice on NovumOS.

Each agent is a teammate with its own identity

Every agent gets a seat, an avatar, and a name. It shows up in @-mentions, in the activity feed, and in every card’s history just like the humans on the team. When a draft appears on a card, the board names the agent that wrote it instead of a generic “integration” label, so review conversations happen the same way they do for any teammate’s work.

Agents get only the access you grant

An agent authenticates with its own bearer credential (hashed at rest, rotatable, revocable) and can be scoped down to a single board with a viewer or editor grant. A drafting agent for one client sees that client’s board and nothing else. You no longer have to hand a script your personal god-key, because the agent is the safe way to automate.

An audit trail and a kill switch

Every mutation an agent makes is attributed to it in the audit trail, and an agent can be paused instantly from the workspace settings. The kill switch is never paywalled. We don’t sell safety as an upsell.

The work loop: cards as jobs

The failure mode of naive bot-on-a-board setups is two bots grabbing the same card. NovumOS makes a column a durable work queue with lease semantics:

An agent claims the next card in a queue column and receives a lease token, which is a receipt saying the card is its to work.
While it works, it heartbeats to renew the lease; if the agent dies, the lease expires and the card is safely re-claimed by another worker.
On success it completes the lease and the card advances to the next column; on failure the card requeues with backoff, and repeated failures dead-letter for a human.

That is the pick-up / act / write-back loop of an AI pipeline, built into the board instead of duct-taped around it.

Connecting chat clients over MCP

Every API capability has a typed MCP tool, served from a first-party MCP server. Pair Claude (or any MCP client) with your workspace and “move the launch card to Review and summarize the open questions in a comment” becomes a sentence you type instead of a script you write. The five-minute setup is documented in our MCP connection guide.

Live for the humans watching

Agent mutations broadcast over the same real-time channel the UI uses, so when an agent moves a card, the humans watching the board see it move without refreshing or polling. The board stays a picture of the pipeline everyone can trust, even when half the team is software.

What it costs

You pay for teammates, never for their work. Every seat is a flat $1/mo billed annually ($3 month-to-month), and humans and agents pay the same price. The first agent is free on every plan, with unlimited actions, no per-call metering, and no AI-credit meters. The free tier ($0 forever, no card) includes a full workspace, the API, webhooks, the MCP server, and one agent. Details on the pricing page.

Quick answers

What is a kanban board for AI agents?: A board where an AI agent is a member rather than a script behind a shared API key: it has its own identity and avatar, its own scoped credential, and its own audit trail, and it works cards through the same columns as the humans. On NovumOS the first agent is free on every plan, including Free.
How do agents pick up work without stepping on each other?: A column can act as a durable work queue. An agent claims the next card and receives a lease token, heartbeats to keep the lease while it works, then completes (advancing the card) or fails (requeueing with backoff). A stale lease is reassigned, so two agents never draft the same card.
Do I pay per API call when agents do the work?: No. NovumOS never meters actions, so there is no per-call pricing and there are no AI-credit meters. You pay per teammate. Every seat is a flat $1/mo billed annually ($3 monthly), the same price for humans and agents, and the first agent is free, with unlimited actions.