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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 already authorized in Cowork → Customize → Connectors. The plugin pre-declares 26 Cowork-native MCP servers (Gmail, Slack, Atlassian, Linear, Notion, Fathom, ...) so they appear in the Connectors panel ready to enable. 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.

Built on Anthropic's Live Artifacts (released April 2026). The first kanban board on this substrate.

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: Claude Cowork Desktop (any version) or Claude Code CLI. Node 18+ for local development. No other dependencies.

In Claude Cowork (Desktop):

1. Customize → Plugins → Add marketplace
2. Paste sabbah13/cowork-tasks, click Sync
3. Install Cowork Tasks from the marketplace

In Claude Code (CLI):

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

Then run /open-board and your kanban opens in the Live Artifacts tab.

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. Powered by your Cowork plan. No API key needed.

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 - powered by your Cowork plan, no extra key.
Local-first	Tasks are JSON files in ~/.cowork-tasks/. Yours. Offline-readable. No cloud dependency.

Technical

Cowork-native composition	The plugin doesn't ship its own OAuth, polling daemons, or per-source binaries. It composes the Cowork-hosted MCP connectors you've already authorized 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.
Live artifact UI	Native Claude Cowork dashboard. 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 Cowork's connector graph - all of it is yours to remix.

Sources supported

Cowork Tasks reads from whatever Cowork-hosted MCP connectors you've enabled. The plugin pre-declares all of these so they appear in Customize → Connectors ready to authorize.

Family	Cowork 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 Cowork ships an MCP for a source we haven't pre-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 Cowork (Desktop)"]
        Artifact["Live 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["Cowork-native MCP 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, live artifact UI, triage-now / coach / setup / health skills, task-extractor owner-first agent, 26 Cowork-native MCP connectors pre-declared.

Upcoming:

• 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 Cowork's native MCP connectors (declared in packages/plugin/.mcp.json). If you want a new source, the right path is for Cowork to ship the MCP - 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 Cowork MCP)
• Issues - bugs and feature requests
• Discord - in progress, upvote to prioritize

License

MIT - free to use, modify, and ship.