cowork-tasks

Cowork Tasks

The kanban that fills itself in.Watches email, Slack, meetings, and issue trackers. Writes the cards. You drag Done.

Try the live demo - no signup, no install

Drag cards, open the side panel, click Ask Claude actions. Seeded with real-looking data.

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Cowork Tasks is a kanban board that watches your work happen and updates itself. Cards arrive from your email, Slack, meetings, Linear, and Jira automatically. Replies, status changes, and new deadlines move them around in the background. You drag the ones that matter to Done.

Built for developers, founders, and technical PMs who live in their inbox and hate retyping tasks into a second app.

No API key needed. No tokens to paste. Cowork Tasks reads from the connectors you've connected in Claude (Customize > Connectors). The plugin lists 26 supported connectors (Gmail, Slack, Atlassian, Linear, Notion, Fathom, ...) on its own Connectors tab, where you add and connect the ones you want. Local-first: tasks live in ~/.cowork-tasks/ - not someone else's cloud.

Most task tools make you retype work into them. Cowork Tasks reads where the work already lives - your inbox, your Slack, your meeting transcripts.

The board is a Claude artifact. It currently uses the live-artifact interface Cowork shipped in April 2026; Anthropic replaced that with a newer artifact runtime in August 2026, and moving the board over is planned (see the audit and refactor plan).

What gets captured

What happens	What lands on your board
Email asking "can you review this by Fri?"	Card in Inbox with the email linked
Slack DM "could you handle X today?"	Card in Inbox with the permalink
Meeting transcript "Sam will draft the proposal"	Card in Inbox with the Fathom timestamp
Linear / Jira issue assigned to you	Card in Inbox with the issue link
A reply on the same email thread	Same card, updated
The issue moves to In Review	Same card, status updated

The assistant keeps watching and updating in the background. Coach mode (/coach) reads your board and picks two to start with, flags what's stuck, calls out what to drop.

Install

Requirements: the Claude desktop app (Cowork sessions run on your computer, which the bundled local MCP server needs) or Claude Code CLI. Chat on the web or mobile ignores local MCP servers. Node 20+ for local development. No other dependencies.

In the Claude desktop app:

1. Customize > Plugins > Add > Add marketplace
2. Enter sabbah13/cowork-tasks (turn on Sync automatically to receive updates)
3. Install Cowork Tasks from the marketplace
4. Open the plugin's Connectors tab and add and connect the sources you want

In Claude Code (CLI):

claude plugin marketplace add sabbah13/cowork-tasks && claude plugin install cowork-tasks@cowork-tasks

Then run /cowork-tasks:open-board and your kanban opens as an artifact in the Artifacts view.

Quickstart

/setup        — connect your sources (Gmail, Slack, Fathom, ...)
/open-board   — open the live kanban
/triage-now   — pull your latest action items from connected sources
/new-task     — capture a thought from chat as an action item
/coach     — ask the coach what to start with, what's stuck, what to drop
/health       — connector + board status

Card detail + Ask Claude actions

Click any card to open the side panel. Source link, priority, due date, checklist, comments, and four AI actions - Summarize source, Tighten title, Draft reply, Split into subtasks. Each one builds a ready-to-run prompt and copies it to your clipboard; paste it into the conversation and Claude runs it on your plan. No API key needed. (Running them inside the board returns with the new artifact runtime.)

Features

Core

Always-on assistant	Watches your communications and creates cards as work happens. Updates existing cards when replies, status changes, or new deadlines arrive.
Coach mode	/coach reads your board, picks 2 to start with, flags what's stuck, calls out what to drop.
AI card actions	Summarize source, tighten title, draft reply, split into subtasks - prepared as a prompt you paste into Claude, so they run on your plan with no extra key.
Local-first	Tasks are JSON files in ~/.cowork-tasks/. Yours. Offline-readable. No cloud dependency.

Technical

Connector-based composition	The plugin doesn't ship its own OAuth, polling daemons, or per-source binaries. It composes the hosted connectors you've connected in Customize > Connectors. One auth surface, shared with every other plugin.
Batched LLM triage	One LLM call per triage run, not per message. The triage-now skill pulls deltas from each enabled connector, hands them to the task-extractor agent in a single batch, then writes only the owner's own action items to the board.
Artifact UI	Kanban dashboard inside Claude. Refreshes every 2 seconds. Unchanged state = empty diff = zero re-renders.
MIT licensed	Fork the artifact UI, extend the triage rules, contribute new skills. The plugin is a kanban + skills + agents layer over Claude's connector graph - all of it is yours to remix.

Sources supported

Cowork Tasks reads from whatever connectors you've connected. The plugin declares all of these in .mcp.json, so they are listed on its Connectors tab where you add and connect them. Installing the plugin does not connect anything by itself.

Family	Connectors used
Email	Gmail, Microsoft 365 (Outlook)
Calendar	Google Calendar, Microsoft 365
Chat	Slack, Microsoft Teams (via MS365)
Issues / project trackers	Atlassian (Jira), Linear, Asana, monday.com, ClickUp, GitHub
Knowledge bases	Notion, Guru
Meeting recorders	Fathom, Fireflies, Granola, Gong
Customer support	Intercom
CRM	HubSpot, Close
Incidents / on-call	PagerDuty, Datadog
Files	Box, Egnyte
Signatures	DocuSign
Design	Figma, Canva

The full list lives in packages/plugin/.mcp.json. If Anthropic ships a connector for a source we haven't declared yet, open an issue - it's a one-line addition. We do not maintain custom connectors in this repo.

Architecture

flowchart TB
    subgraph Cowork["Claude desktop app (Cowork)"]
        Artifact["Artifact<br/>Kanban Dashboard<br/><i>polls every 2 s</i>"]
        Skills["Chat / Skills<br/>/open-board · /triage-now<br/>task-extractor agent"]
        Artifact <-->|JSON-RPC over stdio| Skills
    end

    MCP["MCP Server (Node)<br/>owns ~/.cowork-tasks/<br/><br/><i>list_tasks(since) → {version, diff}</i><br/><i>create_task · update_task · move_task</i><br/><i>prepare_board_artifact · check_version</i>"]

    Disk[("tasks/*.task.json<br/>config.json<br/>processed.db")]

    Connectors["Hosted connectors<br/>(declared in .mcp.json)<br/><br/>Gmail · Google Calendar · MS365<br/>Slack<br/>Atlassian · Linear · Asana · monday · ClickUp · GitHub<br/>Notion · Guru<br/>Fathom · Fireflies · Granola · Gong<br/>Intercom · HubSpot · Close · PagerDuty · Datadog · ..."]

    Cowork ==> MCP
    MCP <==> Disk
    Cowork <-.triage-now skill calls each connector's tools.- Connectors

    classDef cowork fill:#fbfbfa,stroke:#1a1a18,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#1a1a18;
    classDef accent fill:#f6e5dd,stroke:#c96342,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#1a1a18;
    classDef disk fill:#eeedec,stroke:#56554f,stroke-width:1px,color:#1a1a18;
    classDef ext fill:#fbfbfa,stroke:#56554f,stroke-width:1px,stroke-dasharray:5 3,color:#1a1a18;

    class Artifact,Skills cowork;
    class MCP accent;
    class Disk disk;
    class Connectors ext;

See docs/architecture.md for the full diagram.

Comparison

	Cowork Tasks	Linear	Motion	Notion AI
Tasks update themselves when reality changes	✓	✗	✗	✗
Auto-capture from email	✓	✗	partial	✗
Auto-capture from meetings	✓	✗	✗	✗
Auto-capture from Slack	✓	partial	✗	✗
Coach mode (picks 2 to start, flags stuck, calls out drops)	✓	✗	✗	✗
Data on your machine	✓	✗	✗	✗
Open source	MIT	proprietary	proprietary	proprietary
Cost	$0 + $0.30/mo LLM	$8/user/mo	$34/mo	$10/user/mo

Roadmap

Shipped: Core MCP server, artifact UI, triage-now / coach / setup / health skills, task-extractor owner-first agent, 26 connectors declared.

Upcoming:

• Move the board to Anthropic's new artifact runtime, and bring in-board AI actions back (see docs/audit-2026-10.md)
• Calendar awareness - auto-task from accepted invites (v0.5)
• Snooze-until-tomorrow card action (v0.5)
• Keyboard navigation polish (v0.5)
• Team mode: shared board across multiple Cowork users (v1.0)
• Custom views: list, calendar, timeline (v1.1)

PRs welcome - good-first-issue.

Contributing

UI polish, triage rule improvements, MCP server features, and skill prompts are all welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Quick links:

• High-impact areas to work on
• Local dev setup
• Architecture overview
• Task schema reference
• Code of Conduct
• Security policy

Note on connectors: Cowork Tasks does not ship its own connectors. It composes the hosted connectors declared in packages/plugin/.mcp.json. If you want a new source, the right path is for Anthropic to ship the connector - then it's a one-line addition here. We do not accept custom connector packages.

Maintainer SLA: PRs reviewed within 48 hours. Good-first-issue PRs are usually merged the same week.

Used by the maintainer daily. Feedback and battle reports welcome in Discussions.

Community

• GitHub Discussions - questions, showcases, source-coverage wishlist (request a connector)
• Issues - bugs and feature requests
• Discord - in progress, upvote to prioritize

License

MIT - free to use, modify, and ship.