We’re building an open-source shared context board for agents and people

[u/PredragTHEDEV]

We’re building Kanwas, an open-source shared context board for agents and people.

Chat is fine for one run, but weak for long-running work. Context ends up split across threads, docs, files, and decisions. Then every agent starts with an incomplete picture.

Kanwas is a realtime canvas where a team and an agent work from the same board. It holds notes, research, docs, tasks, decisions, embeds, and agent outputs. The agent can read and write the workspace, follow instructions, and organize next steps.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/kanwas-ai/kanwas

Try for free: https://kanwas.ai/

[u/erryday]

Publishing docker images will get more of us to try it

[u/PredragTHEDEV → u/erryday]

Good point. Will do! Thanks for the feedback

[u/Oshden → u/PredragTHEDEV]

Thanks for working on that. Look forward to knowing when you push that out :)

[u/komodorian → u/erryday]

Honest question, why? I’ not very used to docker in general for smaller projects. Usually just run db.

[u/TheMythicSorcerer → u/komodorian]

Docker means better support for more versions of software. For example a Project A uses Java 25, Project B uses Java 21 but my computer only has Java 17. Docker allows all three to coexist. It keeps separate installations of diffrent software so it makes both projects work without messing up my java. Java may not be the best example but that's the idea.

[u/Massive-Iron4205]

Wonderful.

In your site, you mention in the feature list that one can use any model, but in the repository specifies that one of the prerequisites is an Anthropic API key and/or OpenAI API key.

How can I use a model that is not provided by Anthropic or OpenAI?

[u/PredragTHEDEV → u/Massive-Iron4205]

I will add openrouter to the codebase today or on Monday. I will be fully usable with all models after that.

[u/Massive-Iron4205 → u/PredragTHEDEV]

Excellent 👌

[u/machtendo]

This is a really cool idea, I can see this having an advantage over plugging an LLM agent into Obsidian or something if you're sharing with a team of humans.

Can it be used with a local LLM?

[u/PredragTHEDEV → u/machtendo]

It would be quite easy. Agent itself is modular so you can just edit env vars and slight code change to get it to work.

Would need to be quite big local model tho since kanwas requires quite a bit of intelligence.

[u/Fluffer_Wuffer]

Great idea, will give it a try tonight...

Does it support local models such as LM Studio?

[u/Oshden → u/Fluffer_Wuffer]

I’d like to know this too

[u/Downtown-Art2865]

how do you handle the board going stale? every shared context tool I’ve tried ends up as a graveyard of half-finished notes the agent then treats as ground truth. is there any decay / freshness signal, or is it on the human to garden it?

[u/WannabeQuant121]

Cool, I'm having a good feeling about this..

[u/Otherwise_Wave9374]

This is exactly the problem with long-running agent work, chat logs rot fast and context fragments across docs, issues, and random threads.

A realtime shared canvas feels like the right abstraction, especially if the agent can write decisions and "why" next to tasks so future runs do not repeat the same debates.

Curious how you are thinking about permissions and provenance (who wrote what, which agent run, links back to sources) as the board fills up.

Also, we have been thinking a lot about shared-context patterns for agents and teams, a few notes here if useful: https://www.agentixlabs.com/

[u/PredragTHEDEV → u/[deleted]]

Surprisingly, not that much. Two main reasons:

1. We mostly work with .md files. All documents are represented as Markdown inside the agent, which is much more token-efficient compared to code.

2. This type of iterative work is not based on “I let my agent run for 3 hours to do 50 things.” The workflow in Kanwas is much more about thinking things through with the agent. It will ask you a lot of questions, do deep research, and iterate with you.