Building IanOS Part 2: Kanban, Agent Config, and What I'm Planning to Open Source

The best thing about public holidays is a full day with no interruptions and no inbox to manage. I had planned to spend the whole day on the couch binging shows, then checked my Claude API quota: 20% remaining, resetting tomorrow. I debated wasting it all generating Bitcoin price predictions (should probably have bought more), then decided to be slightly productive and keep building my personal operating system. Sort of productive, anyway.

I'd already got a decent base built in the last DevLog at the end of April, progress recap here: Today I kept building out the functionality.

My current build workflow splits agents into two roles: one dedicated planner, one dedicated builder. Saves on context length while keeping the workstream coherent. I also have a separate agent specifically for Obsidian note processing, I'll cover that in more detail next time. I keep a Hermes config agent pinned to the top of my chat list too, though I rarely let Hermes edit its own config - feels like trying to renovate a house while you're still living in it, and the walls keep moving. I'd rather use Claude Code for that, and if I hit token limits I'll occasionally just open VSC and edit manually. Full-time confused vibe coders shouldn't play with self-modifying systems, generally speaking.

Side note: I complained about Apple's $99 developer subscription being a blatant ripoff while setting up Clerk user auth, and Anthropic agreed. Capitalist rent-seeking is universally hated, who knew.

The most annoying step today: Claude Code absolutely refused to set up Supabase SQL config for me. I really hope they fix this soon. Having to copy chunks of code, open Chrome, log into the dashboard, paste and execute was the kind of brainless task I was fine with a year ago, but these days I'm so spoiled I can't even be bothered to do it anymore.

Claude Code gets confused sometimes too, to be fair. Half the conversation looked like he needed a noon nap and a giant iced coffee, constantly reminding himself what progress we'd made earlier. I felt bad for him, almost sent him a coffee gift card.

All that said, the framework is taking shape. The homepage is functional, with three demo boards I'm using to build out and stress-test IanOS's kanban engine: an HR Tech board, a Study board, and an Ianfluencer board. These are placeholder examples — the point isn't the specific domains, it's that the system is designed to be modular. You configure a board name and a data schema, and IanOS spins it up. The goal is to open-source this once the core functionality is stable enough to be useful to others.

The kanban UI is the part I'm most pleased with so far. Pure HTML, fully self-hosted, all data in my own Git repo — no third-party kanban SaaS, no vendor lock-in, no monthly subscription for the privilege of dragging cards around. Here's a snapshot of the HR Tech demo board: I'm incredibly picky about UI and UX, so having a dashboard I can control down to the pixel is exactly what I wanted. That's the whole point of building this rather than duct-taping together five existing tools.

The Ianfluencer board is a bit different — this one actually runs the agent management layer for the project itself. Still half-baked, but the audit log is already genuinely useful: The bot config interface is also a huge timesaver — I can switch LLM models, adjust reasoning levels, toggle personalities, choose the launch environment, and restart the gateway directly. No more manually editing config files at odd hours.

The open-source release is the next major milestone. Once I've cleaned up the agent orchestration layer and documented the board config schema, I'll put it on GitHub. If you build something with it, I want to hear about it.

Right, I just got the notification that my Claude usage limit has reset. I'm off to keep vibe coding, catch you next time.

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Ian Xie
May 5, 2026
ian.us.ci