| name | refinement |
| description | Groom the top of the backlog until enough items are Ready — labelled, sized, unblocked, epic-assigned, and implementable without a follow-up question. |
| disable-model-invocation | true |
Refinement
Turn the top of the backlog into Ready work. The bar: an Engineer could pick the item up and implement it without coming back with a question. Refinement works top-down in priority order — a beautifully groomed item at position 40 is wasted effort.
The Ready bar
An item is Ready when it has:
- a problem statement an outsider could understand (what + why, not just a title),
- acceptance criteria — observable outcomes, checkable one by one,
- a size the team believes (split anything that smells like an epic — see below),
- no open blocker, and its dependencies expressed as issue relations, not prose,
- an epic assignment if it serves one (via the
board skill), and triage labels per docs/agents/triage-labels.md.
Process
- Pull the backlog top via the
board skill; take items in priority order.
- For each item, test it against the Ready bar and fix what fails — draft the missing problem statement or criteria from the issue thread and the codebase, then confirm with the user rather than inventing intent. A question only the reporter can answer: ask it on the issue, label
needs-info, move on.
- Split items too big to size: slice by outcome (each slice independently shippable), never by layer ("frontend part" / "backend part" ships nothing). Each slice becomes its own issue under the same epic; the original becomes the epic or gets closed with pointers.
- Set Status = Ready on the board as items clear the bar.
Stop when the Ready column holds roughly an iteration's worth of work (or the preset's buffer under Kanban) — refinement past that horizon goes stale before it's picked up.
Done when: every touched item either meets the full Ready bar, carries needs-info with a concrete question, or was split/closed — and the Ready buffer is restated in one line ("Ready now holds ~9 days of work").
