| 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
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
- 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.
- 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.
- Creates a sibling worktree at
../salesagent-<ticket>.
- 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.
- Writes
.envrc exporting BEADS_DB, with the mirror-back command baked
in — see the warning below.
- 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
