Show HN: Obeya, a spatial canvas for directing coding agents

Yeah, I know, "not another AI GUI rolls eyes". So let me say upfront: This is not for you if you want to regularly review the code agents produce. But if you, like me, stopped writing code at the beginning of the year and for the most part stopped reading it a few months ago, you are my target audience, and I think there's a good chance you'll benefit from this.

I love directing agents to build stuff. But oh, can you get lost in parallel coding sessions. Just walls of text. Cycling through terminal windows. It feels like pair programming with multiple people at the same time. Then: Start a dev server, navigate to the place of interest, click around to test a new feature. It feels like I'm the QA department of my agents.

About 6 weeks ago, I reflected on this for a few days and came up with a better way. I'm sharing it because it works so well for me.

Main idea: I want to be the agents' engineering director. I sit in the conference room and talk to them. Give them tasks. They come back and show results to me. I lean back and watch and listen to demo videos (mostly) or read presentation docs (sometimes). I give feedback orally to have them iterate. Or I approve, and they carry the change to main.

The work is laid out as cards on a canvas. There is color to show state, so cards can stay put, and I can build a mental map. I mostly drive it via voice. New task: Just say it. Something off in the demo video: Hold the space bar and say it, as if you're pointing something out in a review meeting.

There is a coordinator in the background that sequences cards for you based on their dependencies. It also runs regular retrospectives and proposes cards to improve your setup.

There are many more aspects I could describe, but then this post would just be another wall of text, so instead, in the spirit of Obeya, I suggest you watch the video at the top of https://obeya.si. It gives an introduction to Obeya, and it's an example of a demo video. All demos of Obeya's own development get published at https://demos.obeya.si if you want more examples.

https://github.com/sadilek/obeya – free, open-source, local