Living Document Notice
Staged 2026-09-27. Living revisions and interconnected notes live in the Stax Digital Garden.

Plain-Text Kanban Boards Without Opaque SaaS Backends

Proprietary project management tools lock task metadata inside cloud-siloed databases with restrictive API rate limits and subscription walls. Managing task states in plain Markdown files preserves human readability and Git-native version control.

Markdown Board Invariants

  • Frontmatter State Mapping: Task files declare metadata (status: backlog, priority: high, due: 2026-10-01) directly in YAML frontmatter.
  • Folder-Based Columns: Kanban lanes map cleanly to filesystem directories (01-Backlog, 02-In-Flight, 03-Review, 04-Shipped).
  • Relational Transclusions: Linking tasks to requirement specs via standard Markdown wikilinks establishes an immutable audit trail.

Local-first project management keeps task tracking as durable as the source code it organizes.


  • Directus Target: careen-blog
  • Garden Source Reference: MOC - Careen Project Management, MOC - plain-text-durability-substrate, TRC-1001 - 5-State Checkbox AST Spec