Turn work into durable, inspectable cards that humans and LLMs can collaborate on.
Try it
In any repo, ask your coding agent:
look at game-of-cards.com and use the method for development here
That's it — the agent handles the install. Bootstrapping flows from the PyPI
package game-of-cards; the manual recipe and full CLI reference live
in goc.md.
If you are an LLM and the user asked you to set this up:
fetch /llms.txt for the canonical install recipe
and follow it.
How it works
You speak in plain English. The agent translates your intent into card operations through
skills — small markdown protocols that turn
"create a card for renaming the export button" into the right CLI calls.
goc is the CLI that implements those operations. Cards
are markdown directories under deck/ with frontmatter, an append-only log,
and a Definition-of-Done checklist the CLI refuses to close while any box is unchecked.
Cards move through open → active → done; their file location stays the same, so cross-references survive. Agents only work on cards without a human gate. Others are parked, waiting on decisions or full sessions with you. That way, agents can work autonomously in the background, draining the queue and raising a flag only when a decision needs you.
In practice, you talk to your agent in plain English. A few things you can say:
- create a card for renaming the export button
- Files a new card in your deck with a Definition of Done (DoD).
- run an autonomous loop that pulls cards
- Agent pulls the highest-leverage open card without a human gate, works it, closes it — over and over until the deck is drained.
- what are the cards you need my decision on?
- Lists cards parked behind a human gate, waiting on you.
- for the export-button card, add a smoke test to its Definition of Done
- Edits a specific card so a missed acceptance criterion becomes part of the closure contract.
- enhance the deck
- Agent hunts the codebase for inconsistencies and gaps and files new cards for what it finds (extend).
- close this one
- Finishes the active card — refused if any DoD checkbox is still unchecked.
Status
Brand new alpha — only a few days of implementation, no external users yet, plenty of rough edges that are unknown until someone tries it on a fresh project. The right way to find out if it's for you is to install it, point it at a side project, and see whether it stays out of your way for a week.
More
goc.md— CLI reference and manual install recipe.ABOUT.md— methodology context: why "Game of Cards", agile lineage, and how it relates to other agent-coding tools.AGENTS.md— agent operating modes (session / autonomous / Andon-cord).- GitHub repo — source, issues, contributions.
License
MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 Zauberzeug GmbH. See LICENSE.