The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2025–2026
Bloop's open-source Vibe Kanban hit 18K GitHub stars, then shut down over free users
London startup Bloop open-sourced Vibe Kanban in 2025 to orchestrate AI coding agents; it passed 18K GitHub stars by Jan 2026, then shut down in Apr 2026.
Bloop (Bloop AI Limited)
What the business is
Bloop is a London startup, founded 2021, that built Vibe Kanban: a free open-source desktop board where developers plan work as kanban cards, run multiple AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot and more) in parallel, and review diffs before merging.
Starting capital：Bloop had raised $7.43M before the pivot (ROSS Q4-2025 lists FinTech Innovation Lab, Ascension, ByTheTower and Khosla among backers); the April 2026 announcement does not disclose remaining runway.
How it started
Founded in 2021 by Louis Knight-Webb and Gabriel Gordon-Hall, Bloop first shipped an AI code-search desktop app, then pivoted to enterprise legacy-code modernization with ModerniseAI. In 2025 the team redirected the company around Vibe Kanban, sharing an early version in June with a small developer community and fully open-sourcing it on GitHub in July.
What happened
Vibe Kanban rode the coding-agent wave by orchestrating native agent CLIs rather than raw models, chrooting each run into its own git worktree so parallel agents could not clobber each other's files or ports. JournalDuNet's January 2026 report put the repo above 18,000 stars and demonstrated three agents (Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex) building a web game in under an hour from one board.
How it ended up
On 2026-04-10 Bloop announced it was shutting down: thousands of engineers used Vibe Kanban daily but the vast majority were free users, and the team could not find a business model it was excited about. The project continues as community-maintained open source under Apache-2.0; remote services were retired within 30 days and paid subscriptions were refunded.
Background
Bloop is a London startup founded in 2021 by Louis Knight-Webb and Gabriel Gordon-Hall. After an AI code-search product and a COBOL-to-Java modernization pivot, the team bet in 2025 that the engineer of tomorrow is an orchestrator of AI agents — and that the interface for that job is a kanban board where each card is a task for a coding agent.
The result, Vibe Kanban, ran native agent CLIs (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot and others) instead of raw models, isolating every run in its own git worktree so parallel agents could not overwrite each other. It launched to a small community in June 2025 and was fully open-sourced on GitHub in July; a board lets developers assign cards, watch status, comment on diffs and merge.
Adoption was fast: JournalDuNet reported more than 18,000 GitHub stars by January 2026, and ROSS Q4-2025 logged the repo growing from 1.0K to 5.5K stars by 12 Oct 2025. The tool was free — only the underlying agents cost money — and reviewers showed three agents building a working web game from one board in under an hour.
The business did not survive the adoption. On 2026-04-10 Bloop announced shutdown: thousands of engineers used Vibe Kanban daily but the vast majority were free users, and the team could not find a business model it was excited about. Vibe Kanban continues as a community-maintained Apache-2.0 project, local-first, while the company that defined the category is gone.
What has to be true
- Bloop bet that planning and reviewing, not typing, would become the engineer's job, making the board — not the model — the product.
- Orchestrating native agents instead of raw APIs meant Vibe Kanban inherited each vendor's full tooling and cost users nothing extra, matching how developers already paid.
- Open-sourcing in July 2025 turned GitHub stars and community attention into distribution, letting a small team ship multi-agent support, diff commenting and live preview first.
- Chrooted git worktree isolation solved the coordination problem that made parallel agents dangerous, giving developers a safe reason to run several at once.
- Free-for-everyone with no compelling paid tier scaled usage instead of revenue — the exact gap the founders named in the shutdown note.
What can be applied
Adoption without payment is a product win and a business failure: Bloop proved the multi-agent workflow but never monetized it, so a category-defining open-source tool outlived the company.
Aftermath
After the 2026-04-10 announcement, Vibe Kanban became a community-maintained Apache-2.0 project: remote and cloud features were retired within 30 days, subscriptions were terminated with refunds, local workspaces kept working, and the team promised a roadmap for the community edition. Independent commenters read the shutdown as a verdict on the business model, not the idea, and rivals quickly moved into the multi-agent board category. The founders signed off saying they were 'not out of ideas' and saw a non-commercial future for the project.
Sources
- Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex... Un outil gratuit pour les gouverner tous : Vibe Kanban
- Top trending open-source startups in Q4 2025 — ROSS Index
- Goodbye bloop
- Vibe Kanban After Bloop: What Happens to Users, and Where to Go
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