Conventions (team memory)

kanman learns your team's rules from review feedback, turns repeated objections into conventions, and shows you exactly what it learned and why.

Every team has rules that are written down nowhere: use the shared money formatter, never call the payment API from a controller, put feature flags in one file. People learn them in code review. kanman learns them the same way, and unlike a black box, it shows you what it learned and lets you change it.

How kanman learns

  1. During a run, kanman keeps a scratchpad. At the end it writes a short retrospective: what worked, what it had to redo.
  2. In review, the independent reviewer run raises objections, for example “use the shared money formatter instead of toFixed”.
  3. After each attempt, lessons from the retrospective and the reviewer’s objections are stored and tagged with the areas of the repository they apply to, such as src/invoices.
  4. Every night, kanman groups the objections of the last 90 days. A group becomes a convention once it has at least three objections from at least two different runs. An objection that matches an existing convention strengthens it instead; a retired convention is never created again.
  5. In future runs, pinned conventions are always part of the executor’s brief, active ones when they apply to every area or to an area the story touches. Recent lessons and objections on the same areas come along too.

Conventions you can see

Open the team and choose the Conventions tab. It lists active and pinned conventions (pinned first) under Active, and retired ones under Retired. Each convention shows:

  • the rule in one sentence, for example Format money with the shared formatter
  • where it applies (Applies to: repository areas, or every area)
  • its source, for example 3 review findings; its detail page lists them under Where this came from, with links to the runs
  • its status: active, pinned or retired

What you can do with a convention

Action Effect
Pin Puts the convention into every run of the team, whatever area the story touches. Unpin makes it a normal active convention again
Edit Rewrites the rule in your words. The lineage to the original runs stays
Retire Removes it from future runs. It moves to the retired list, where Restore brings it back

Every change is recorded in the audit log as convention_changed with your name.

Why it matters

kanman gets better at your codebase every week, and you can see what it learned. Reviewers stop repeating the same comment, and new rules are visible to everyone instead of living in one person’s head.

What is not stored

Conventions hold rules and short excerpts from review findings, not copies of your code. They belong to the team and are deleted with it. See Retention and deletion.

Last updated: January 1, 0001

Open kanman