A deep-dive into TrelloAgents — the architecture, the thinking, and what you can steal for your own workflows.
I kept running into the same wall.
Every time I wanted to move an idea from "thing I'm excited about" to "thing I can actually build or hand to someone," I'd hit the spec-writing phase and slow to a crawl. Not because the thinking was hard — the thinking was mostly done. It was the documentation of the thinking. The translation of a fuzzy idea into a structured, coherent, technically rigorous product requirements document. That part was eating hours, sometimes days.
I knew AI could help. But "help" usually meant: open a chat, describe the idea, get a draft, spend the next 45 minutes editing. Better than nothing. Still slow. Still me-dependent.
What I wanted was a system that could take a raw idea and produce a production-ready PRD — autonomously, with built-in quality review — while I was doing something else.
So I built one. And in building it, I accidentally designed something that taught me more about multi-agent AI architecture than any tutorial I've read.
This is that story.
Before I wrote a single line of code, I had to answer a question that turned out to be more important than any technical choice: where does the system store what it knows?
Most people building agent pipelines reach for a database. A table somewhere. A JSON file. A vector store. All reasonable. But they introduce a problem: the state is invisible. You can't look at a database row and understand, at a glance, where your idea is in the process, what's been done to it, what the output looks like.
I wanted the system to be legible. I wanted to be able to open a single view and see the entire pipeline in motion — not read logs, not run queries.
That's when I looked at my Trello board and had the realization that unlocked everything:
A Kanban board is already a state machine.
Each column is a state. Moving a card is a state transition. The card is the work item, carrying its history with it. Trello wasn't designed for this, but it's exactly right for it. The board becomes the database, the dashboard, and the control panel simultaneously.
This is Concept #1: use the tool that's already legible. Don't build infrastructure to track what a visual tool can show you for free.
So I mapped the pipeline to the board. Seven columns:
Intake → Decompose → Spec Write → Spec Review → Assemble → Final Review → Done
Every idea enters at Intake as a card. The card moves right as agents process it. When it reaches Done, the PRD is attached. The board tells the whole story without opening a single log.