← back
Backlog.md: Terminal Kanban Board for Managing Tasks with AI Agents — Alex Gavrilescu, Funstage
Takeaway
Decompose big features into atomic markdown tasks with explicit acceptance criteria and an MCP-exposed workflow so AI agents stay in-scope and reviewable.
Summary
- Backlog.md is a terminal kanban board where tasks are markdown files in the repo with frontmatter (id, title, labels), description, acceptance criteria, and implementation plan.
- Provides an MCP server exposing resources (workflow overview, task creation guide, execution guide, completion guide) plus tools (search/view/create/update tasks) so Claude, Codex or Gemini can drive it natively.
- Three review checkpoints — after task creation, after implementation plan, after code — let humans catch agent drift before running out of context window.
- Demo: Claude implements an interactive move/reorder feature in the kanban itself by reading backlog rules, creating the task, then writing code against the acceptance criteria.
- Atomic markdown tasks act as context-engineering to prevent agents from running out of context or implementing extra unwanted features.
agentscontext-engineeringmcp
Original description
Never leave your terminal to create and manage tasks for your AI agents. Backlog.md stores all your tasks as Markdown files in your Git repo. By exposing the main workflows and commands as MCP tools, your AI agents will know how to take tasks from "To Do" to "Done," and you will no longer run out of context window or miss important requirements in any of your features. Alex Gavrilescu leads backend & web engineering at Funstage GmbH in Vienna, keeping millions of free‑to‑play gamers happily tapping. He still ships code, tinkers with Raspberry Pi Kubernetes clusters for fun, and is passionate about weaving project‑management smarts with practical AI. Most recently he created Backlog.md, a micro‑tool that turns side‑project chaos into shippable tasks. --- Socials: - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrugavrilescu - X (Twitter): https://x.com/H3xx3n - GitHub: https://github.com/MrLesk - Website: https://mrlesk.com/ - Company: Funstage GmbH (https://funstage.com/)