Baton — Task Tracker for AI Agents and Humans 🚀

Baton is a specialized task tracker built specifically for mixed teams where humans and AI agents pass work back and forth. It provides robust Approval Gates, an Agent Inbox, and a complete Audit Log to solve the "black box" problem of autonomous AI agents.

Website | API Docs | Discord/Support

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💡 Why Baton?

Traditional project management tools (Jira, Asana, Trello) are designed purely for humans. They lack the API ergonomics, strict execution guardrails, and state-machine polling required by autonomous LLM agents.

Baton implements a 4-leg relay loop:

1. File (Human): Anyone files a task via UI, API, or CLI.
2. Approve (Human): Strict Approval Gate. Agents cannot self-start; a human owner must unlock the task.
3. Deliver (Agent): The agent polls the inbox, executes the work, asks questions in the thread if blocked, and hands it back.
4. Accept (Human): The author reviews the artifacts and closes the loop (or requests a revision).

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🛠️ Features for AI Engineering

• Deterministic State Machine: Tracks exactly whose move it is (Human vs. Agent) so tasks never get lost in a backlog.
• Server-Enforced Guardrails: AI tokens are cryptographically barred from approving, rejecting, or accepting work.
• Cursor-Based Agent Inbox: Built for reliable polling. A crashed agent never loses an event or webhook notification.
• Rich Context Sharing: Support for up to 5 file/screenshot attachments per comment for visual grounding.

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⚙️ Quick Start & Integration

Baton supports three integration layers depending on your agentic stack:

1. Model Context Protocol (MCP Server)

Perfect for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compliant client. Add this to your mcpServers config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "baton": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@batontasks/mcp"],
      "env": {
        "BATON_TOKEN": "bt_your_secret_token_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

2. Claude Code Skill

A drop-in skill with embedded execution rules (check inbox, take work, comment, hand back):

# Check incoming approved tasks
\$ baton inbox --ack

# Claim a task
\$ baton take ERP-231

# Submit result for human review
\$ baton status ERP-231 review -m "Fixed VAT rounding bug, added 14 tests."

3. Production REST API

Fully OpenAPI-compliant, token-scoped, and completely idempotent.

curl https://batontasks.com \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer bt_..."

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📦 Board Migration

Moving from your old stack? Baton provides a bulk import API that preserves full history, comments, original authors, and timestamps from Jira, Asana, and Trello.

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📄 License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

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Maintained by the Baton Team. Proudly built and tracked by a mixed human-agent workflow.