Kanban Board with WIP Limits & Card Aging
Turn a flat task list into a live kanban board with per-column work-in-progress limits and card-aging highlights — so the team instantly sees when a column is overloaded or a card has gone stale, with a confirm step before anything moves to Done and a review gate before bulk changes are written back.
A logged-in kanban tool where you import your task list, see columns with work-in-progress limits, watch cards light up as they age untouched, drag cards between columns with a confirm step before anything lands in Done, get a soft (override-with-reason) warning when a column goes over its WIP limit, route bulk status changes through a review gate, and export the updated board as a clean CSV — with a full audit trail of every move.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A task list export (CSV) with status/column, owner, and last-updated date
- Your column definitions and WIP limits
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Your team's work lives in a tool that shows you everything except the two things that actually matter: where work is piling up, and where it's quietly stuck. The board looks busy, cards drift to the right, and yet the cycle time creeps up and nobody can say why. Somebody pulls a fifth thing into "In Progress" while three other cards have sat untouched for two weeks. Stand-up turns into a guessing game because the stale card and the overloaded column don't announce themselves — you have to remember they exist.
That's not a discipline problem. It's a visibility problem. Flow-based teams live or die on two simple signals: don't take on more work in a column than you can handle (a work-in-progress limit), and don't let a card rot (aging). Most boards show neither clearly. The result is overload nobody flagged and stale work nobody chased, and a team lead who finds out too late.
What you'll build
A simple internal kanban board built for the way flow-based teams actually run. You import your task list — status/column, owner, last-updated date — and it lays out as a board with your real columns. Each column carries a WIP limit, and when it's exceeded the board warns you in place (it doesn't hard-block you — you can override with a reason, which gets logged). Every card shows its age since it was last touched, and cards that have sat too long light up so the eye goes straight to them.
You drag cards between columns to update status. Moving a card into a Done (or any system-of-record) column triggers a confirm step — a deliberate "yes, this is done" — so finished work isn't faked by accident. Need to move a batch of cards at once? Bulk changes go through a review gate before they're committed and exported. When you're done, you export the updated board state as a clean CSV in the exact columns your other system expects. Nothing is written back to your system of record automatically — the tool tracks the board; a person approves what leaves it.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how your team works today, what your task export columns are actually named, your real column names and the order they flow in, the WIP limit for each column, how you measure a card's age and when it counts as "stale," and your messy edge cases (blocked cards, cards with no owner, reopened work, cards that skip columns). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then shapes the board, the limits, the aging thresholds, and every later step around your answers. You get a board fitted to your team's flow — not a generic template.
From there the plan walks the agent through the CSV import (with duplicate guards on task ID), the board layout with live WIP counts, the soft WIP warning with override reasons, the aging computation and highlights, drag-to-move with the Done confirm step, the bulk-change review gate, a daily digest email of stale cards and overloaded columns, and a clean CSV export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a "No API yet?" path so you can build and run the whole thing today from a spreadsheet, no integration required.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This is built like a real internal tool, not a toy. The plan bakes in login so only your team gets in; row-level security so a team only ever sees its own organization's board; a complete audit trail of every move, override, and approval — who did what, and when; a hard human-in-the-loop confirm step before a card lands in Done and a review gate before bulk status changes are written back or exported; and duplicate guards keyed on task ID so the same card can't be loaded or moved twice. Nothing writes to your project tool or system of record automatically — the board proposes the change, a person confirms it, and the export carries it back.
Who it's for
Team leads, scrum masters, delivery managers, and ops managers running flow-based teams who are tired of overloaded columns and stale cards that nobody catches until stand-up. If you can name your columns, set a limit for each, and say when a card is "too old," you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be staring at a live, self-flagging board this weekend.