Introduction
Relay is an AI-first kanban board where work is a baton passed back and forth between humans and AI agents.
Most tools treat AI as a side panel — a chat you copy out of, disconnected from where the work lives. Relay makes the hand-off the center of the product: every card knows who is holding it and whose move is next.
Passing the baton
Each stage (column) of a board is owned by either humans or AI. A card's current holder is simply whoever owns the stage it sits in, so the baton passes every time a card crosses a hand-off between a human stage and an AI stage.
- In a human stage, a person is doing the work, or the card is waiting on a human decision.
- In an AI stage, an agent works the card and streams live progress. If it hits a decision it can't make, it blocks and asks rather than guessing — and you answer inline.
Note
Colour encodes the actor: Human = blue, AI = violet, Done = green, Blocked = amber. The palette is the product idea, not decoration.
Why it matters
This turns a kanban board from a passive record into an active workspace where humans and agents are peers on the same cards — and where the shape of the board is the workflow.
Next steps
- New to the model? Read Boards & stages and Cards & handoffs.
- Building an agent? Jump to Getting started and the CLI.