Shared context board for teams and agents

Try Kanwas for free at kanwas.ai

What's Kanwas?

Kanwas is a multiplayer workspace for AI work. Teams and an AI agent share the same documents, evidence, and decisions, with the agent's tool calls streaming into the same timeline everyone sees.

Who it's for

• Founders. Turn a fundraising deck, customer interviews, MVP spec, and hiring plan into one canvas where the agent helps across all of them. Less context to keep in your head, more output across many fronts.
• Product managers. Drop interview snippets, tickets, and competitor screenshots on a board; get a discovery readout and a PRD with every claim traceable to its source.
• Developers. Pull a PM's spec, designs, and research onto a canvas; work with the agent to turn it into an implementation plan with tasks and acceptance criteria. Then kanwas pull the markdown into your repo and hand it to Claude Code, Codex, or whatever coding agent you use.
• Marketers. Plan a launch with positioning, messaging, asset list, and timeline. The agent drafts copy variants you can compare side-by-side and iterate on with the team.
• Sales. A reusable account board: research, comms history, stakeholder map, and proposal drafts. Each deal makes the template better.

Why teams use it

• Shared context that compounds. Every decision and outcome makes the next board better than the last.
• Canvas + agent on one surface. Work alongside AI over the same evidence, ideas, and trade-offs — transparent to everyone.
• Sharp deliverables in minutes. Generate structured, execution-ready artifacts for every stage of the work.
• Your files, your repo. Git-backed markdown filesystem with full version history. No vendor lock-in.

Quickstart

Prerequisites

• Docker + Docker Compose
• An Anthropic API key (and/or OpenAI API key)

Run it

git clone https://github.com/kanwas-ai/kanwas.git
cd kanwas

# Env files — fill in API keys, APP_KEY, etc.
cp .env.example .env
cp backend/.env.example backend/.env
cp yjs-server/.env.example yjs-server/.env
cp frontend/.env.example frontend/.env

docker-compose --profile app up

Open http://localhost:5173 and you're in.

For local development (hot reload, running services with pnpm dev) and the architectural walkthrough, see docs/SYSTEM_OVERVIEW.md.

CLI

kanwas is a command-line tool for syncing a workspace with your local filesystem. Useful when you want to edit notes in your editor of choice, bulk-import markdown you already have on disk, or script workspace access from CI or another agent.

Install

npm install -g @kanwas/cli

Authenticate

kanwas login

Opens a browser tab to authorize the CLI. Auth is stored globally in ~/.kanwas/config.json.

Edit a workspace locally

mkdir my-workspace && cd my-workspace
kanwas pull            # interactive picker, downloads files into the current directory
# ...edit files in your editor...
kanwas push            # uploads local changes back to the workspace

After the first pull, the directory is bound to that workspace via .kanwas.json. Subsequent pull / push reuse it automatically.

Import markdown from disk

kanwas import ./notes                       # interactive workspace picker
kanwas import ./notes --name "My Workspace" # non-interactive, by name
kanwas import ./intro.md --id <uuid>        # single file, by ID
kanwas import ./notes --dest research       # place imports under a subfolder
kanwas import ./notes --overwrite           # replace files that already exist

Walks the source path, picks up every .md file (other files are skipped), preserves directory structure, and creates them in the target workspace.

List / script

kanwas workspaces             # list workspaces
kanwas workspaces --json      # JSON output for scripting
kanwas pull --id <uuid>       # non-interactive: pin to a specific workspace
kanwas pull --name "<name>"   # non-interactive: by exact name

All commands accept --id or --name to skip the interactive picker, which makes them safe to use from CI or wrapping agents.

Source: cli/ · npm: @kanwas/cli

Community

Questions, ideas, want to chat with the team?

• 💬 Kanwas Kollective on Slack

Contributing

We'd love help. A few notes:

• Read docs/SYSTEM_OVERVIEW.md for the mental model and project-specific gotchas (especially around Yjs/BlockNote — clone semantics and transactions matter).
• Open an issue before large changes so we can align on direction.
• Run pnpm format and the relevant package's lint before opening a PR.
• First-time contributors will be asked to sign our Contributor License Agreement. The CLA bot will comment on your PR with a link and the signing phrase — you only need to sign once.

License

Kanwas is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Acknowledgements

Kanwas stands on the shoulders of Yjs, BlockNote, AdonisJS, E2B, and many other great open-source projects.