BBMAD Board

What is the BMAD method?

The BMAD method is a way to build software with AI agents that is repeatable. Instead of poking a chatbot until something useful appears, you run a project through a small number of well-defined phases, each driven by a specialist agent, each leaving behind a document the next phase can build on.

It was created by Brian Madison and released as 100% open source — free forever, built by practitioners who ship software every day. BMAD Board is a visual cockpit for the method; the method itself belongs to everyone.

In one line: BMAD turns working with AI agents from prompt-rolling into engineering.

The problem it solves

Coding agents are fast — often faster than you can keep up with. Left unstructured, that speed works against you:

  • You hold all the context in your head, so you become the bottleneck.
  • Decisions live in a chat scrollback that no one can find later.
  • The agent forgets what you agreed an hour ago, and you re-explain it.
  • Work drifts, because nothing pins down what you're building or why.

The method fixes this by making context external and durable. Every important decision becomes an artifact on disk. The agent doesn't have to remember — it reads the brief, the PRD, the architecture, the story spec. And because the context is written down, any agent (or any teammate) can pick up where the last one left off.

The core ideas

1. Phases, not vibes

Work moves through four phases, in order: Analysis → Planning → Solutioning → Implementation. Each phase has a clear goal and a clear output. You always know which phase you're in and what "done" looks like.

2. A team of agents

Each phase is led by an agent — a persona with a specialty and a voice: an analyst, a product manager, a UX designer, an architect, an engineer, a test architect. You talk to them. You're the agile lead; they're your hybrid team. → Meet the agents

3. Artifacts carry the context

Every phase writes something down — a product brief, a PRD, an architecture spine, a story spec. These artifacts are the memory of the project. They flow forward, so nothing has to be re-derived from scratch.

4. The story cycle

Implementation isn't one giant leap. Work is broken into small stories, and each story runs a tight loop: create → develop → review, repeating until it's right, then Done. Small, reviewed increments — real agile, with an AI team.

What a project looks like, start to finish

  1. You have an idea. Mary the Analyst helps you understand the problem and write a brief.
  2. You decide what to build. John the PM writes a PRD; Sally adds UX if there's a UI.
  3. You decide how to build it. Winston the Architect lays a spine and breaks the work into epics and stories.
  4. You build it. Amelia the Engineer implements each story; Murat the Test Architect guards quality; you review and ship.

Every arrow in that diagram is an artifact handed forward.

How BMAD Board fits in

The method is a discipline you could run entirely from a terminal, by hand. BMAD Board makes it a place you can see:

  • Your epics and stories, laid out and tracked by phase.
  • Every agent one click away in an embedded terminal, on the LLM of your choice.
  • Every artifact browsable and editable in the Documents view.

You bring the judgment; the board keeps the method in front of you and the agents at your fingertips.

It scales down, too

You don't have to run the full pipeline for every change. Brownfield projects and small tweaks can go lighter — a quick architecture spine, a couple of stories, or the unified /bmad-quick-dev workflow that clarifies, plans, implements, and reviews in one pass. The discipline stays the same; the ceremony shrinks to fit. → See "Do I have to do every phase?"

Next steps

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