Kishore Kanthan

Trellis

Moves a team's work across a board, with an AI agent at each step. People approve every gate and merge every change.

A sample Trellis board with four stage lanes. One card waits on an agent. Two cards wait at a gate for a person to decide.
One Trellis work item paused at the Waiting on us stage. The Approvals card shows it waiting for P. Nayar to decide.
A workflow file lists the steps, and the board is built from it. Agents work their steps, people own the gates, and the ticket carries its cost.

What it is

Trellis moves a team’s work across a board, one step at a time. An AI agent works each step, and people approve the gates. Each board sets its own steps, so it is not tied to one kind of work. A workflow for code changes has these steps:

  1. Intake. A person asks for a change. An advisor agent checks the request first and looks for work that already exists.
  2. Ticket. The request becomes a ticket. People write its acceptance criteria, and agents never change them.
  3. Build. A coding agent edits the code, runs the tests and opens a pull request.
  4. Review. A second agent checks the work and comments on the ticket.
  5. Merge. A person merges. This workflow keeps the merge with a person, as a choice of trust.

A board shows each ticket, its step and its cost, and updates live.

One design decision

The steps are data, not code. Each workflow is a short file that lists its steps and prompts. A new kind of work needs a new file, not a new release.

The rules it keeps

  • People own the gates. An agent never approves its own work. It names the person who must approve.
  • No silent stops. When a ticket cannot go on, the agent says why, who can unblock it, and what comes next.
  • Numbers come from commands. Test results and costs come from tools that ran, not from a model’s opinion.
  • Development systems only. Agents can change development systems, never test or production systems.
  • Cost on every ticket. Trellis records what each step costs, so a team can see the price of the work.

How it runs

Trellis is packaged as Docker images, with a Helm chart for Kubernetes.

  • One chart. It runs the API, the workers, the web app, Postgres and Redis.
  • On by default. The chart turns on ingress, TLS, network policies and autoscaling.
  • Options. Monitoring, backups and an external secret store are settings in the chart.
  • Tested install. A smoke test installs the chart on a local Kubernetes cluster.

Status

Trellis is in active development. The code is private for now.