sub-task-breakdown

name

sub-task-breakdown

description

Break one story into the sub-tasks it actually decomposes into — each with a title, checkable acceptance criteria, a grounded effort range, and its dependencies — in Jira's own vocabulary and nobody else's. Produces a proposal to argue with, never sub-tasks written into Jira unless explicitly asked for. Use when a story is too big to start, or before refinement. Triggers on: break this down, split this story into sub-tasks, sub-tasks for, decompose, too big to start, slice this, what are the pieces, sequence the work, task breakdown, how do we break this into tasks.

Sub-task Breakdown

A story that is too big to start is usually not too big to describe — the pieces are known, they were just never written down, and so nobody can begin, estimate, or parallelize. This skill writes them down: a small set of sub-tasks, each with acceptance criteria a reviewer could actually check, an effort range grounded in comparable past work, and the dependencies that fix their order. The output is a proposal. Which slices are right, and whether they get filed at all, stays with the team.

Underneath, memory-search owns the search ladder and the relevance gate, graph-traversal owns relationship walking when a summary names a thing without stating it, and memory-capture owns any durable write; all three ship with the gutt-pro plugin (this plugin depends on it) — without them, follow the rules below and note the gap in one line. Jira access comes from whatever Atlassian tooling the session surfaces; find it in your tool list — names and prefixes vary per install.

Hard rules (non-negotiable — read first)

1. Jira is read-only by default; filing is a gated exception. Never touch the parent story — not its description, not its acceptance criteria, not its fields, not its status. Divergence from the parent goes in the proposal, and in a comment if the user approves one; the story's own text is the author's. Sub-tasks are created only when the user asks for them in this session and approves the exact set — titles, criteria, and links as they will be written. Creating issues is outward-facing and not undone by an apology: approval is the gate, and silence is not approval. The other permitted write is one comment, on the same exact-text terms.