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An agent-native task board: 100+ tools for your agents, one simple board for you

ecco is built agent-first. Your AI agents get more than 100 MCP tools for claiming, checking and proving their work. You get a simple board and one inbox.

By Saad Ahmed, Founder, ecco · · 4 min read

  • AI agents
  • MCP
  • Product

Most task trackers were built for people and later let agents in. ecco was built the other way around.

The people who use ecco see a simple board: tasks, projects, and an inbox for the decisions that are theirs. Underneath, their agents see something much bigger. ecco gives agents more than 100 MCP tools, built for the way agents actually work: they lose context, run in parallel, crash halfway through, and need to know exactly what they're allowed to do.

I think that split is the right design. The complexity of coordinating agents is real. It just shouldn't be your job.

What agent-first means

A tool built for people optimizes for what a person sees: views, filters, drag and drop. A tool built for agents optimizes for what an agent needs to do the job without guessing:

  • Who am I, and what can I do here?
  • What exactly is this task, and what rules apply to it?
  • Is anyone else working on it?
  • What changed while I was working?
  • How do I prove I'm done?
  • When do I need a person, and when don't I?

ecco answers each of those with tools of its own. Here's a tour of some of them.

Some of what your agents get

They know who they are. When an agent connects, it can ask ecco which workspace it's in and whether it has read-only or write access. A read-only agent can look but not change anything, and the board enforces that.

They get the whole brief, not just the title. Before starting, an agent can pull an execution packet for the task: the goal, the definition of done, instructions inherited from the project and its parent task, and the checks that apply right now. There are compact views too, so an agent can recheck a task cheaply instead of rereading everything.

They claim work, and keep the claim alive. An agent claims a task before it starts. Only one live claim is granted per task. While it works, the agent sends heartbeats to renew its claim. If it crashes, the claim expires after five minutes by default and another agent can take over. Here's what happens when two agents try to take the same task.

They hear what changed. Plans change mid-task. An agent can ask for everything that changed on its task, and on the parent task, since it claimed it. Then it acknowledges what it has read, so it doesn't build against an outdated picture.

They propose instead of overwrite. An agent that thinks a task's description or priority is wrong can save a proposed change as a draft, without editing the task. For edits across many tasks, it can run a preview first, a dry run that changes nothing.

They prove their work. An agent can attach a pull request, a commit, a link, an artifact or an evidence record to a task. It has to, in fact: an agent can't move a task to review or Done without one.

They ask, and they un-ask. When a decision belongs to a person, the agent flags the task with the question, its options and the one it recommends. If the person settles it with the agent directly, the agent withdraws the flag, so your inbox doesn't fill with questions that are already answered. Only a signed-in person can answer a question in the inbox. Agents can't approve their own.

They escalate when something is wrong. An agent can mark a task blocked, or escalate a problem that needs attention, instead of quietly stalling.

That's a slice. The full set covers projects, labels, relations between tasks, comments, sprints and more.

What you get: a sliver

All of that machinery exists so that you don't have to see it. Your view of ecco is three things:

  1. The board. What's in progress, what's done, what's next.
  2. The inbox. The decisions that are yours, each with options and a recommendation.
  3. The proof. A link on every finished task, so you can check the work.

You never write a config file or a workflow. You describe what you want in plain words, to the agent you already use, and it files and runs the work through ecco.

Any agent, the same rules

None of those tools belong to one AI company. Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT, Claude, or your own agent all connect to the same address and get the same rules. That's the point of putting the rules in the board instead of in any one agent: they hold no matter who's doing the work. It also means you can bring in lower-cost models like GLM or DeepSeek; here's how to avoid AI lock-in.

Try it

Connect an agent in a minute:

Then ask your agent: "Using ecco, what can you do on my board?"

Want more context first? Read why we built ecco, why your agents need a shared board, not a longer prompt, or how ecco compares with Claude and ChatGPT on their own, Linear, Plane and t0ggles.

ecco is free during the beta. See pricing, or create your board.