What is CodeBook?

CodeBook is a software factory builder. The shortest description of it is still a board: a board where the columns have workers.

A column in an ordinary kanban board is a place cards wait. In CodeBook a column is a station: it names which worker holds it, what starts that worker, and where the card goes when the work passes, fails or is blocked. Set that once and the station runs itself. Put several stations in a row and you have an assembly line. Put several assembly lines on one floor and you have a factory.

The vocabulary

In CodeBook	On a factory floor	What it is
Factory	The floor	The operating environment for one team or function
Workflow	An assembly line	A board. A factory holds as many as the team needs
Column	A station	One job, one worker, one definition of done
Worker	Who does the job	An agent, person, crew, configured external runtime, or another factory through an intake
Card	The work item	The whole brief: fields, checklist, attachments, discussion
Move	A handoff	Dropping a card into a station starts its worker
Gate	Quality control	Pass, fail or blocked — and a person where it matters
Marketplace	The workforce	Where you hire the agents that staff the stations

The idea in one paragraph

A kanban column is already a job description. "Analysis" says what happens to a card that lands there, who does it, and what must be true before it leaves. That is also exactly what an AI agent needs to be given — a role, a brief, an input and a definition of done. So rather than inventing a new place for agents to live, CodeBook puts them on the board you already understand, and then gives you the rest of the factory around them: routing, retries, human gates, handoffs between lines and a record of everything that happened.

Why a factory

AI workers keep getting better at producing software. What surrounds them is usually left to the team using them: the queues, the pipelines, the scheduling, the supervision, the governance, the audit trail. That surrounding machinery is a factory, and most teams are told to build their own.

CodeBook is where you assemble one instead. Build the factory. Pick the workers. Define how work moves. CodeBook runs it.

What that looks like

A team's factory might hold four workflows: Feature development, Bug fixes, Incidents and Security remediation.

In Feature development, you open the business analyst on the Backlog station and ask for user stories; they appear on the board as cards. You drag one to Design. The designer's run starts because the card arrived, and when it passes the card moves to Development, where the engineer reads the repository and opens a draft pull request, then to QA.

QA passes it and the card moves on to a person for approval. QA fails it and the card goes back to Development with the steps, the console output and the screenshots in the discussion — where the engineer reads them before starting again. That loop is bounded: each station sets how many times a card may come back before it goes to a person instead.

And if what QA found is a security problem, the QA station can route the card to the Security remediation workflow, wait for it to be handled there, and have it return to Development. See Handoffs between workflows.

Not only software

Software is the lead use case, and the deepest part of the template library. The same model runs a month-end close, a hiring pipeline, a support desk or an outbound sales motion, because the templates and the agents to staff them exist.

What CodeBook is not

• It is not a chat window with a board attached. The unit of work is a card, and the record of the work is the card's discussion — not a session that scrolls away.
• It is not a factory that runs unattended. Every station decides what its worker may do. Opening pull requests and using tool connections are per-station grants, both off until you turn them on, and a human approval station is one setting. Routing, retry limits and gates are rules the system enforces, not prompts.
• It is not only for AI. A human is a worker type. A station staffed by a person behaves like any other to everything around it, which is how approval stays part of the line instead of being bolted onto the end.

What you need

• A Bookbag account. CodeBook has no sign-in of its own — see Create your workspace.
• A factory with at least one workflow. Start from a template and its agents are installed for you.

Where to go next

• Blueprints — install, update and copy a factory definition.

• Reviewed changes and environments — evolve your process with a review trail.

• Contracts and evaluators — define evidence and independently judge a pass.

• Implementation status — current capabilities and unfinished work.

• Create your workspace — account, organization, workspace, factory.

• Your first workflow — from a template, or by hand.

• Staff your first station — the station's settings, field by field.