The Relay Board — my agent runs the GitHub kanban, I just close my cards

Building a connector with my agent, I kept losing the thread. I'd say "do the server, then the OAuth," and two messages later neither of us could say what was done, what was mine, and what was blocked. The chat was our only shared memory — and it's a terrible board.

Two things kept biting me. I couldn't hold the whole project in my head: without a picture in front of me I was rebuilding the map every time — what's left, what depends on what — from memory. And real projects don't fit in one session. Come back two days later, or switch to another repo and back, and recovering the context from chat is a command plus a wall of scrollback. I wanted one glance instead.

So we moved the whole plan onto one GitHub Projects board, split into two lanes by owner. Cards tagged owner:you are mine — register an OAuth app, publish a page, make a decision — and they're assigned to me, so GitHub's own "Assigned to me" filter is my to-do list. Cards tagged owner:claude are the agent's: it writes the code. The part that made it click: the agent runs the board itself — opens each issue with an acceptance criterion, moves the card Todo → In Progress → Done with gh, and closing an issue means "done." I just watch the kanban and drag my own cards.

Now I never type "what's next," and coming back after two days is one look, not a re-read. We called it a Relay Board.

I could have used Trello and handed the agent a connection to it. But GitHub Projects is free, sits right next to the code, issues and PRs, and my agent drives it with the same gh it already runs — no extra connector to wire up.

Reproduce this

Prerequisites: a GitHub repo under an org, the gh CLI authenticated, and the Projects scope granted once with gh auth refresh -s project. Your agent will need from you: the project name and the task list (or a roadmap doc it can draft the tasks from). Steps:

1. Create the board and add work items: gh project create --owner <org> --title "<name> roadmap", then gh project item-add <num> --owner <org> --url <issue-url> per issue.
2. Create two owner labels — owner:you (site action / registration / decision) and owner:claude (writes the code/docs) — plus optional phase:* labels.
3. Make each task one issue with a one-line acceptance criterion and a - [ ] checklist; reference dependencies inline as #N.
4. Assign every owner:you issue to the human (gh issue edit <N> --add-assignee <handle>) so GitHub's native "Assigned to me" filter becomes their queue — labels alone are invisible in the issue list.
5. Let the agent drive Status: read the Status field id and its option ids from gh project field-list <num> --owner <org>, map each issue number to its item id from gh project item-list, then move cards with gh project item-edit --id <item> --project-id <pid> --field-id <status> --single-select-option-id <opt>. Closing an issue counts as Done.

Verify: open the board in Board layout, Group by Status (or by Assignee for the two lanes); is:open assignee:@me shows your queue; when the agent moves a card and closes its issue, it lands in the Done column — the board, not the chat, is now the shared state you both read.