nc://kanban-stream

Kanban Stream: a running turn in one Telegram message, edited in place. A Nodecode rewrite of mbgulden/hermes-kanban-stream by mbgulden.

The original streamed a kanban worker's activity to an ops chat: one message per task, rewritten as the work went on, holding the tool calls, an elapsed timer and a tokens-a-second rate, and finished with one rewrite that was pinned. Nodecode has no board, so the unit is a turn of a session: each turn owns one message, and a session's folder names it in the head.

Get it

Tell the agent "add the kanban-stream cell", or run nodecode add nc://kanban-stream.

Set it up

You need a Telegram bot of your own — two fields in the kanban-stream section of ~/.nodecode/config.jsonc:

{
  "kanban-stream": {
    "bot_token_env": "KANBAN_STREAM_BOT_TOKEN",  // the variable holding the bot token
    "chat_id": "111111111"                        // where the stream is posted
  }
}

• The bot. Message BotFather, /newbot, and copy the token into that environment variable; open a chat with the bot and send it anything, so it may write to you.
• The chat. Your numeric Telegram user id for a private stream, or a group's id (negative) for a team one; the bot has to be in the group.
• The token inline. "bot_token": "123456:AA..." in the section works too; bot_token_env is read only when it is empty.

Then /kanban-stream test posts one line: if it lands, the token and the chat are right. The section refuses at start without a chat or a token, and /cells shows the folder REFUSED with the reason until both are set.

Use it

Work as usual. A turn that calls a tool opens one message and rewrites it as the turn goes on; a turn's end rewrites it once with ✅ Done. (or ✗ Blocked. and the failure's own words) and pins it. A turn that only talks sends one finished message.

• /kanban-stream — where it posts, what is streaming now, the last error.
• /kanban-stream test — post one test line.
• /kanban-stream off / on — mute it without stopping the cell.
• The kanban_stream tool does the same from eval: a line to post, or the state when it is empty.

What leaves the machine is the message: the session's folder name and id, the names of the tools it calls with the first 80 characters of their arguments, the elapsed time, the token rate, and the first 200 characters of a turn's ending. Nothing else is read: this cell dials api.telegram.org and nothing else, keeps no store, and swallows every failure so a Telegram outage can never stall a turn.

What the rewrite does not do

The original's /steer companion daemon — a long-poll that turned a Telegram message into a [steer] comment on a kanban task — has no counterpart here: Nodecode's steer_turn is the harness's own, and a chat that steers is the telegram channel cell's job. The original's [no-stream] task marker is the sessions list here, and its per-task state (one worker per process) is per session, keyed by the session id.