| name | orchestrating-issues |
| description | Use when the user hands off one or more GitHub issues for you to take from intake to a draft PR — especially when they ask you to pull latest, spin up a worktree per issue, run sub-agents in parallel to implement and review, commit and push, and report back when branches are ready for a live smoke test. |
Orchestrating Issues to Draft PRs
Overview
Run one or more GitHub issues end-to-end — intake to draft PR — as a thin orchestrator: sequence the phases, hold the human gates, and delegate the actual work to the skills named in the phase table below.
Core principle: one issue = one worktree = one branch = one booted deployment = one draft PR. Issues never share state. Run independent issues in parallel; when one depends on another, sequence them. You are the conductor — sub-agents do the implementing and reviewing inside their own worktrees.
Human gates (do not blow past these)
The whole point is that the user stays in the loop at three moments. Stop and wait for them:
- After intake — present your plan back: per-issue scope against each issue's acceptance criteria, the dependency/parallelism graph, and any file/migration overlap between issues. Surface clarifying questions. Wait for approval before touching code.
- At smoke test — report each branch as ready and wait while you and the user go back and forth on the live deployment until it actually works.
- At PR review — open draft PRs, then read the user's GitHub comments and address them in a loop until they're satisfied. Re-verify each change in proportion to its size — a logic change re-runs tests + smoke (Verify 6, Smoke 7); a comment/doc tweak gets a lighter check.
Everything between gates runs autonomously.
Phases
| Phase | What you do | Delegate to |
|---|
| 1. Intake | Read each issue — body and all comments (gh issue view <n> --comments). Distill scope against each issue's acceptance criteria; map dependencies (seed from the issues' own parent/sequence links); spot file/migration overlap between issues; list genuine clarifying questions. Gate: present the plan, wait for approval. | — |
| 2. Sync | Pull the latest default branch (usually development) so worktrees branch from current code. | — |
| 3. Provision | Create each issue's branch linked to the issue, then a worktree + local deployment on it (see Branch creation below). | mmgis-deployment (create.sh, start.sh) |
| 4. Implement | Dispatch one sub-agent per worktree, scoped to that directory, to do the work — committing and pushing as it goes. Tell it the issue's collapsed plan is a stale sketch to re-investigate, but to heed any marked gotcha. Run independent issues in parallel; sequence dependent ones (downstream branches off the upstream branch, not bare development). | superpowers-extended-cc:dispatching-parallel-agents |
| 5. Review | After each implementation, have a fresh agent that didn't write the code review it; the implementer addresses findings, then the reviewer re-checks the changed lines. | superpowers-extended-cc:requesting-code-review (or the code-reviewer agent) |
| 6. Verify | Run that branch's tests and check the issue's acceptance criteria (coverage is partial — acceptance is the real bar). Never report "tested" without seeing the output. | mmgis-deployment (test.sh), superpowers-extended-cc:verification-before-completion |
| 7. Smoke handoff | Boot each local deployment, capture the dashboard URL/port, and report (see contract below). Make sure the branch is pushed first. Gate: iterate with the user until it works live. | mmgis-deployment (start.sh) |
| 8. Draft PR | Open a draft PR per issue; body must close the issue (Closes #N). | superpowers-extended-cc:finishing-a-development-branch |
| 9. Address feedback | Read the user's PR comments from GitHub and resolve them. Each substantive change loops back through Verify (6) and Smoke (7) before it counts as resolved. Repeat until the user is satisfied. | superpowers-extended-cc:receiving-code-review |
Branch creation (link the branch to its issue)
Make each branch with gh issue develop so it's natively tied to the issue (the
only way — you can't link a branch after the fact), then hand it to create.sh:
gh issue develop <issue#> --name <branch>
git fetch origin <branch>:<branch>
.../mmgis-deployment/scripts/create.sh <name> --branch <branch>
This covers the pre-PR and stacked window that Closes #N (Phase 8) can't.
The smoke-test report contract
At the Phase 7 gate, report per issue — only claim what you've verified:
- Issue / branch / worktree —
#N, branch name, worktree path.
- Tested — which suites ran and that they passed (cite the result, don't assert it).
- Acceptance — each criterion from the issue's top layer, met or not.
- Reviewed — review done and findings addressed.
- Committed & pushed — branch is on the remote.
- Live — the booted dashboard URL/port the user opens to smoke-test.
Then hand control back: the user drives the live test, you fix what they find, and you only open draft PRs once the smoke test passes.
Parallelism and ordering
Work out the dependency graph at intake. Independent issues run concurrently — provision and dispatch them at once, one sub-agent per worktree, each blind to the others. Dependent issues run in sequence — the downstream worktree branches off the upstream branch so it builds on that work, and its sub-agent starts only once the upstream is committed.
A stacked downstream's base keeps moving — the upstream branch changes through review, smoke fixes, and PR feedback. Each time it does, rebase the downstream worktree onto the updated upstream and re-run Verify, so the base never drifts. The downstream draft PR targets the upstream branch (a stacked PR); retarget it to the default branch once the upstream merges — only then does its Closes #N fire.
Isolation holds regardless of ordering: the orchestrator (you) owns the deployment lifecycle and the gates; sub-agents own implementation and review inside their assigned directory. Don't let one agent reach into another's worktree.
When to stop and ask
You run autonomously between gates, but stop and surface these rather than pushing through:
- An issue is too big. If it becomes obvious that an task is going to produce a massive PR, or one that conflates easily separable tasks, consider telling the user and thinking about splitting it.
- Tests can't pass locally (flaky, infra, environment). Don't claim a green you didn't get — document why and get the user's call.
- Merge conflicts you can't cleanly resolve — surface them, especially across stacked issues.
Common mistakes
- Skipping the issue comments. The body is half the story; decisions and corrections live in the comments. Read both.
- Following the issue's bottom-layer plan literally. It's pinned to an old commit and meant to be re-verified — re-investigate the current code; only the explicitly marked gotchas are meant to be trusted.
- Starting before the intake gate. Surfacing questions and then coding anyway defeats the purpose. Wait for real answers.
- Claiming "tested/reviewed/ready" without evidence. The report contract is a verification claim — back each line with the actual run, per verification-before-completion.
- Sharing state across issues. One worktree, branch, DB, and port per issue. Cross-contamination here is the one failure this structure exists to prevent.
- Opening a non-draft PR, or merging. PRs are drafts the user reviews; they decide when it's ready. Never merge on their behalf.
- Forgetting
Closes #N. Each PR body must close its issue (per the repo's PR convention).
- Creating the branch unlinked. A plain
git checkout -b / bare create.sh makes a branch with no tie to its issue, and you can't link it afterward. Always create it via gh issue develop (see Branch creation).
