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Behind the Craft · 3 min · Aug 2, 2026
One Kanban board can coordinate people and AI agents
Karan Malhotra describes putting human workers and Hermes agents on the same Kanban board, then letting the agent act proactively as it learns a user's needs. That makes mixed human-AI workflows easier to manage.
Karan Malhotra is cofounder of Nous Research.
Peter Yang, Host · Host, Behind the Craft
Led product at Roblox, Reddit, Twitch and Meta for 10+ years.
About this segment
Karan Malhotra describes putting human workers and Hermes agents on the same Kanban board, then letting the agent act proactively as it learns a user's needs. That makes mixed human-AI workflows easier to manage.
From “Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra”, Aug 2, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
“So the fact that I can have a human project manager on the Kanban board that's manually using it while Hermes agents are filling up the pieces”
Takeaways
- Put human and AI work on one shared Kanban board.
- Swap people and agents into tasks as needed.
- Proactive actions depend on permissions and user comfort.
In this episode
Full episode- 26:55Hermes can turn a childhood game idea into a top-tier mod7:03
- 11:11Adversarial context can reduce an AI’s sycophancy over time4:00
23:30One Kanban board can coordinate people and AI agents2:51
- 5 more moments in the full episode
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 23:37
do you have any good examples of more advanced usage you know advanced usage yeah um i'd say like generally i'll talk about some things and then maybe i'll show off a little yeah please yeah but um on the work side on the productivity side i think using kanban is really really underrated i think the ability to have I have, uh... A project manager or any other arbitrarily defined roles, different engineers have one system that manages all of them the way that human beings do with a Kanban board and being able to swap people in and out of it is very powerful.
- 24:14
So the fact that I can have a human project manager on the Kanban board that's manually using it while Hermes agents are filling up the pieces that they ask for, this is a very like industrial professional workflow for this CLI agent. Or I could have a Hermes agent instruct maybe 10 people in a call center on the Kanban board or something like that. I can swap in human and AI anywhere in this orchestration board, basically, this orchestration framework for them all working together.
- 24:45
The Hermes Kanban, I think, is a very useful, powerful tool that's kind of built into it. One thing that we've seen that's very interesting is when Hermes becomes proactive with you. and when Hermes says something like hey you uh you forgot to book this flight for this meeting that you have next week I booked it for you uh this kind of proactivity that kind of starts to show up I've seen people build skills to do this and I've seen it happen emergently inside of people's Hermes agent as well which I think is very very uh cool how do you like because I I just make a proactive through like cron jobs and routines but like how do you you're saying that it can actually start doing stuff with without that or like how do you make it more it's all about your comfort level right okay okay a lot of people may want approval before anything happens
- 25:33
um but if you have given your hermes agent access to some kind of card or account and it has the integrations necessary and you've told your hermes agent hey like take care of me like cover my gaps like you know my schedule you know me over time these kind of proactive behaviors will start to emerge we want to prepare more easy preset configs for people to kind of trigger these kind of behaviors but already something that we're seeing people do in the field at work at their jobs at home in their personal life already and i think that's a very very powerful method of using hermes agent for me i use hermes agent for trying to do training