ploeg

README

Ploeg

Assign a ticket on your own board and Ploeg spins up an ephemeral team of AI agents on your Kubernetes cluster that works it, opens a pull request, reports the outcome, and disappears — every run leased, audited, and crash-safe, with no lock-in on tracker, forge, or agent harness.

An open-source, self-hostable dispatch plane. Bring your own board, forge, and agent harness.

Ploeg is Dutch for a work crew or shift. Teams of specialist agents pick up a ticket, work it, report an outcome, and disappear.

Status: pre-alpha. Ploeg is being extracted from a running autonomous-agent setup (a "dark factory": agents working a ticket board unattended on a homelab Kubernetes cluster). The dispatch core and both executors (KEDA ScaledJob and a KEDA-free CronJob) ship in the chart — opt-in via executor.enabled — and dispatch the originating factory today; a local prototype runs the same core over Docker Compose (see below). Provider write-backs, a Forgejo forge provider, and team manifests are still to come. Watch, don't install.

What Ploeg is

• A dispatch plane, not a board. Your tracker (Vikunja, Jira, GitHub Issues, …) stays the source of truth for what to do. Ploeg owns how work gets executed: assignment events in, ephemeral agent runs out.
• Event-driven, never polling. Assigning a ticket fires a webhook; Ploeg spawns a Kubernetes Job for it. No heartbeat crons burning tokens to discover there is no work.
• Ephemeral by design. Every run is a Job that starts, produces a structured outcome, and dies. Durable state lives in Postgres (work items, leases, checkpoints, outcomes, audit) and in git (branches, PRs) — never in a long-lived agent process.
• Leased, not labeled. Claims are rows with a TTL renewed by the running Job. A crashed pod releases its ticket mechanically; nothing depends on an agent behaving well at death.
• Teams of specialists. A work item is claimed by a team — a declarative manifest of specialist roles (implementer, reviewer on a different model family, tester) — not by a single agent identity.
• Audited end to end. Every mutation, lease, run, and outcome is a Postgres row. Grafana dashboards ship as code.

What Ploeg is not

• Not another kanban UI. The market has plenty; Ploeg has none.
• Not a persistent-agent platform (see kagent) or model serving.
• Not a promise of every integration. Ploeg ships a small, stable provider SPI and two reference providers (Vikunja tracker, Forgejo forge). Further providers are community-owned.

Architecture (v0 sketch)

tracker webhook ─┐                        ┌─> KEDA ScaledJob (per team) ─> agent Job (ephemeral)
forge webhook  ──┼─> ploegd ─> Postgres ──┤        │ lease renewal · checkpoints
                 │   (ingest,  (work items,        └─> outcome report ─> ploegd ─> tracker/forge writeback
                 │    SPI)      leases, runs,
                 └─────────────  audit)  ──────> Grafana (dashboards as code)

• ploegd — single Go binary: webhook ingest, provider SPI, lease manager, outcome ingestion.
• Executor — KEDA ScaledJob with the Postgres scaler is the flagship default; executors are pluggable behind the run-API contract (docs/contracts/executor.md) — a KEDA-free CronJob executor ships in the same chart (executor.type).
• Harness contract — an agent container receives a TaskSpec, must emit an OutcomeReport (schemas). Harness adapters live behind pkg/harness.Adapter: openhands (default), exec (any binary), claude-code — selected per team, along with the agent image, via the team's harness block.

Try the prototype

docker compose -f ops/local/docker-compose.yml up -d --build
ops/local/demo.sh

The demo plays both tracker and agent: a signed Vikunja webhook queues a work item, a claim leases it (FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED + TTL lease), checkpoint and outcome complete it, and the audit trail records every step as a Postgres row. Crash-safety is real: claim an item, report nothing, and the sweeper releases the lease and re-queues the item when the TTL expires.

Roadmap

1. Extraction — core service, Vikunja + Forgejo providers, one harness adapter, audit + dashboards. Exit criterion: the originating dark factory runs on Ploeg in production.
2. Teams & follow-ups — team manifests, checkpoint/resume, PR-feedback ingestion routed to the owning team, a dry-run grooming worker.
3. On demonstrated pull — GitHub provider, CRD/operator graduation, agent-sandbox runtimes, further providers by contribution.

License

Code: Apache-2.0.

The name Ploeg and the Ploeg mark are trademarks — §6 of that licence grants no rights in them, deliberately. docs/brand/TRADEMARK.md says what you may do with them without asking (reproduce them, link, say your software works with Ploeg) and the two things that need permission (shipping a fork under the name, implying endorsement). Settled in ADR-0022.