AI Gantt chart: draft the timeline from a brief, steer it by chat
shadow-planner combines a dependency-aware Gantt chart with an AI planning agent that drafts epics, tasks and dates from a plain-text brief, and a chat assistant that reschedules, queries and rebalances the plan on request.
A Gantt chart is only useful once it's full — and filling it is the tedious part. Creating forty tasks by hand, guessing durations, wiring up dependencies, assigning people. shadow-planner's AI does that first draft for you, then keeps the chart honest as things change.
From brief to Gantt in one step
Paste a project description — a few sentences or a full page of Markdown — into the planning agent. It returns a structured proposal:
- Epics for each phase you described
- Tasks with start and end dates that respect the durations and constraints you gave
- Finish-to-start dependencies wherever you said "after", "before" or "must finish first"
- Assignments matched to the people in your scenario
You review the draft in a preview. Nothing is written to your plan until you click Materialise. Read the full walkthrough.
A Gantt chart that behaves
Once the plan exists, the chart itself does the heavy lifting:
- Drag to reschedule. Dates update live while you drag, including the workdays breakdown.
- Dependency cascades with a preview. Shift a task that others depend on and shadow-planner shows every downstream move before writing anything. Decline and nothing changes.
- Day and month zoom, collapse and expand by project and epic.
- Milestones as single-date markers with the date in the label.
- Saved filters shared between the Gantt and the utilisation view.
- Three-level hierarchy: project → epic → task / story / bug / milestone, with sub-tasks one level down. Deep enough for real work, shallow enough to see at once.
Steer the chart by chat
The chat assistant is scoped to your active scenario and connected to the same data the Gantt shows. Instead of clicking, ask:
"Push the beta epic out by one week and show me what moves."
"Which tasks in Project Atlas have no assignee?"
"Add a milestone 'Go-live' on March 14 under Release."
Destructive operations and cascades pause for approval. Reference entities precisely with @project, @employee or @milestone mentions, and use /status for an instant, LLM-free summary.
Your choice of model
The AI runs on a local model via Ollama by default — nothing leaves your machine. Prefer a frontier model for a complex brief? Switch to Anthropic Claude, OpenAI or OpenRouter with your own key. Only chat messages and the brief are sent; the database never is.
Free to use
The Gantt chart, the planning agent and the chat assistant are all included in the free tier (1 scenario, 3 projects, 3 employees). A €4,99 one-time purchase removes the limits. Install shadow-planner.