ticket-start

name	ticket-start
description	Start work on one or more GitHub tickets: branch off freshly-fetched origin/main, create a sibling worktree, and give it an isolated beads database. Use when picking up a ticket or a small batch of related tickets. Follow with /prime to orient in the new worktree.

Ticket Start

Sets up the workspace for a ticket. Does no research and writes no code — that is /prime's job, and it runs in the new worktree where the context belongs.

Usage

.claude/skills/ticket-start/ticket-start.sh 1776
.claude/skills/ticket-start/ticket-start.sh 1776 1781      # a related batch

The first ticket names the branch and the worktree. Pass several only when they are genuinely one change — otherwise start them separately so each gets its own PR.

What it does

1. Validates every ticket first. A typo'd number fails before anything is created, so you never end up with a half-made worktree named after nothing.
2. Fetches origin/main and branches off that — not local main, which is stale in every worktree in this repo and is the usual cause of a "why is this diff so large" PR.
3. Creates a sibling worktree at ../salesagent-<ticket>.
4. Seeds an isolated beads DB into .beads-local/ with sqlite3 .backup. cp is wrong here: the shared DB is normally live with a WAL sidecar and a plain copy can capture a torn page.
5. Writes .envrc exporting BEADS_DB, with the mirror-back command baked in — see the warning below.
6. Writes TICKETS so /prime needs no arguments.

The beads warning, because it has already cost work

bd resolves its database through git-common-dir, so without isolation every worktree writes the shared database and parallel agents clobber each other. That is why this exists.

But isolated is not the same as disposable. Tickets you create or close in a worktree live only in that worktree until mirrored. On PR #1728 six tickets — including the entire deferral record for one ticket — existed nowhere else and were caught by hand minutes before teardown.

So .envrc carries the mirror command, and you run it before you finish:

bd export --id "<ids>" -o /tmp/beads-mirror-<ticket>.jsonl
cd <main-checkout> && env -u BEADS_DB bd import -i /tmp/beads-mirror-<ticket>.jsonl

env -u BEADS_DB is load-bearing. cd alone does not escape the exported variable — you will silently write back into the worktree DB you were trying to escape.

What it deliberately does not do

• Remove worktrees. Never scripted. Removing a worktree is a decision with no undo; do it yourself when you are sure.
• Touch the shared .beads/. It reads it to seed, and never writes it.
• Run bd sync. It is destructive in this repo and has lost tickets before.

Next

cd ../salesagent-<ticket>
/prime