Kanban mirror (Obsidian)

An optional, user-scoped mirror of the dev flow: each pipeline stage moves a card across an Obsidian Kanban board — one board per project. Everything no-ops silently when it isn't configured; the pipeline never blocks on the board.

Why user-scoped

The board lives in your personal vault, so its path is machine-specific — it belongs in the global ~/.claude/cohorte.config.yaml, never in the committed PIPELINE.md. Boards are keyed by the project's profile name:

obsidian:
  vault_path: "/Users/you/Vault"
kanban:
  enabled: true
  columns: { ideas: "Ideas", brainstorm: "Brainstorm", spec: "Spec", ready: "Ready to build",
             building: "Building", review: "Review", fix: "Fix", ship: "Ship", shipped: "Shipped" }
  boards:
    MyProject:
      board: "MyProject/Tasks.md"

Because the key is the profile name, renaming a project unlinks its board: the old key no longer matches and the lookup legitimately finds nothing. /cohorte-update-pipeline detects the orphaned entry and offers to re-key it; kanban-move.sh --check tells you where you stand.

Wired for you by /cohorte-init-pipeline (opt-in question) or /cohorte-update-pipeline — including creating the board file with the right front-matter, one heading per column, and the plugin settings block. Don't hand-edit the config; the # cfg: anchors in it are what the installer prompts write to.

Cards and the join key

A card is a list item under a ## <column> heading:

- [ ] Invoice CSV export  #facture-export — PR #42

The #<feature_id> tag is the join key between the card and specs/<feature_id>.md — it's how every stage finds its card. Free-text sub-bullets under an Ideas card are seed context /cohorte-brainstorm picks up.

A [<kind>] prefix in the title is a human convention, not a mechanism — nothing parses it, and you can use whatever set fits your board ([chore], [premium], [base]…). Cohorte only writes one itself: /cohorte-patch titles its cards [patch] <title>, and reads the prefix back when it offers the Ideas column, listing [patch] cards first. So a bug you drop in Ideas as - [ ] [patch] 500 on empty cart is what /cohorte-patch picks up with no argument. Once shipped, /cohorte-ship appends the PR number — which cohorte specs reports as a clickable link with live open/merged/closed status.

Stage → column

Pipeline moment	Column
human drops a raw idea	ideas
/cohorte-brainstorm picks it up	brainstorm
/cohorte-spec opens (draft)	spec
/cohorte-spec freezes	ready
/cohorte-patch triages, then freezes	spec → ready
/cohorte-build	building
/cohorte-review	review
/cohorte-fix	fix
a round is under way (in-progress)	building
a round gave up (blocked)	fix
/cohorte-ship starts	ship
PR opened	shipped (+ PR #<num>)

The move script

Commands move cards through the shipped script — the whole operation happens outside the agent's context (find, dedupe, sub-notes carried along, settings block preserved):

<core>/pipeline/scripts/kanban-move.sh auto <id> <stage> [--pr <num>] [--title <title>]

It creates the card in the target column when none exists, keeps the first and drops duplicates.

auto is the important word. The script resolves the board itself — profile name, then kanban.enabled, obsidian.vault_path and boards[name] — and maps the stage key to that board's heading. When nothing resolves it prints kanban: <reason> and exits 0; a board that is configured but unmovable exits non-zero. Commands are told to run it and report what it said, never to decide for themselves that there is no board: that inference, in a fresh phase session that had never opened the config, is what used to strand cards mid-pipeline while every stage still reported success.

kanban-move.sh --check does the resolution alone — the quickest answer to "is this project's board actually wired?". Every call site chains || true, so a missing script is still silent; /cohorte-doctor is what catches a half-copied core.

Backfill / sync

specs/*.md is the source of truth. The reconcile (run by /cohorte-update-pipeline, and at board creation) maps each spec's status to a column (frozen→ready, in-review→review, shipped→shipped, else spec) and fully syncs: missing cards are added, existing cards are moved to the right column — the board always reflects the specs, even where a human dragged cards around.