DevAgent — the Autonomous Kanban
An agent that reads the card and opens the pull request
Context
Every backlog has a band of work that is simple, repetitive and still consumes a developer: one more CRUD, a new form field, a validation tweak.
The challenge
Removing the human bottleneck on that kind of task without giving up review. An agent writing straight to the main branch is a liability; the value only shows up if it enters through the same quality gate as anyone else on the team.
The architecture
The agent acts as a virtual developer inside the workflow that already exists: it pulls the card, interprets the requirement, writes the implementation, runs the tests and opens a pull request. Human review remains the final step — what changes is who writes the first draft.
Architecture flow
Board card
- The requirement as the team already writes it
Agent
- Interprets the requirement
- Writes the implementation
Tests
- No pass, no PR
Pull request
- Reviewable diff
Human review
- The final step stays with the team
Engineering decisions
Delivery by pull request, not by branch
The agent's output is always a PR. That keeps history readable, the diff reviewable and veto power with the team — automation speeds up the start of the work, not the end of it.
Tests as the gate
The agent runs the suite before delivering. If it does not pass, it does not open a PR — which avoids handing human review work the machine already knew was broken.
The card as the spec
The input requirement is the board card itself, written the way the team already writes it. There is no second prompt language to keep in sync.