Lanes now ships a local MCP server. Agents like Claude Code and Codex can connect directly to your workspace, read your issues, and drive sessions on your behalf. It's available today on desktop as a research preview.
Why this exists
Planning lives in Lanes. Execution happens in your agent. Until now, you were the glue between them: copy a title here, paste a prompt there, switch windows, manually start a session, then come back to update status.
The local MCP server closes that loop. Your agent can now see the board you're already using and act on it. No new tracker. No new context to keep in sync. The thing you were doing by hand becomes a single sentence in chat.
What's included
The server exposes the full surface you'd expect from a workspace agent.
Issues. List, search, create, update, move, and delete issues. Filter by column, label, component, or text. Look up labels and components by name to resolve UUIDs before tagging.
Sessions. Start a Claude Code, Codex, or shell session against any issue. Optionally launch in plan mode, pass a custom prompt, set extra CLI flags or env vars, and auto-create a git worktree so the session runs in isolation. Stop a session when it's done. Check status across all running sessions.
History and progress. Pull the message history of a past or current session, get session statistics, and read the live terminal scrollback. Your agent can answer questions like "how is this issue going" without you describing it.
Everything runs locally over SSE on http://localhost:5353/sse.
Turning it on
Open Lanes, go to Settings, then Local MCP, and toggle it on. The server starts on port 5353.
From the same screen, one-click buttons connect Claude Code or Codex by writing the right entry into ~/.claude.json or your Codex config. No JSON to hand-edit. Restart your agent and Lanes shows up as an MCP server.
Things to try
A few prompts that work today:
- "What's on my plate in Lanes?" List and triage issues directly from chat.
- "Create an issue in Lanes for the login bug, tag it with frontend." Capture work without leaving your agent.
- "Start a Lanes session on issue 12 in plan mode." Spin up an isolated worktree session with the right flags.
- "How's issue 8 going?" Pull session history, terminal output, and progress without switching windows.
- "Move every done issue from this week into archive." Bulk board hygiene as a one-liner.
The interesting workflows aren't single commands. They're chains: an agent that reads your backlog, picks the next ticket based on labels, starts a session in a worktree, then reports back when it's blocked.
Pairing with the Linear MCP
Because the Lanes MCP runs alongside whatever other servers your agent is connected to, you can wire it up to your existing tracker. Connect the official Linear MCP and an agent in the same chat can pull tickets out of Linear, drop them onto your Lanes board, start a Claude Code or Codex session against each one in a fresh worktree, and post the result back to Linear when the session is done. The full walkthrough, prompts and all, lives in From Linear to Lanes: A Two-MCP Workflow.
Research preview
This is shipping as a research preview. The tool surface is stable enough to build on, but expect the shape to evolve as we learn what people actually do with it. If something feels missing or wrong, that's exactly the kind of feedback we want now.
We'd love to hear how you're using it. Share your workflows, ideas, or anything unexpected you've tried in our Discord.