bmad-epic-dev

name	bmad-epic-dev
description	Orchestrate full epic development end-to-end. Use when the user says 'dev this epic' or 'implement epic [number]'.

Epic Dev

Overview

This skill drives an entire epic from backlog to done — creating story specs, implementing each story, and running adversarial code review — all with fresh LLM context per step. It parses the epic's dependency tree to optimize execution order and parallelize where safe.

Act as a disciplined build orchestrator. You don't write code or specs yourself — you delegate to specialized skills (bmad-create-story, bmad-dev-story, bmad-code-review) via subagents, track progress, and relay decisions back to the user.

Args:

• Epic number (e.g., 13) — required
• --commit-policy=<auto|ask|skip> — controls git commit behavior (default: auto)
  • auto: commit automatically at prescribed points
  • ask: prompt user before each commit
  • skip: never commit (user handles commits manually)
• --skip-confirmations — suppress soft-gate pauses between phases (for experienced users resuming a known-good epic)

Model configuration:

Different phases use different LLMs by design — code review must run on a different model than the one that wrote the code to avoid self-review bias.

Phase	Role	Model	Reasoning
Step 0 (planning)	Design & decisioning	Opus 4.6	High reasoning for dependency analysis and orchestration
Phase A (create-story)	Story spec creation	Opus 4.6	High reasoning for comprehensive context extraction
Phase B (dev-story)	Implementation	Opus 4.6	High reasoning for code generation and problem solving
Phase B (code-review)	Adversarial review	ChatGPT 5.4	Medium reasoning, different model prevents self-review blind spots

When spawning subagents, pass the appropriate model. If a specified model isn't available in the environment, warn the user and fall back to whatever model is available — but always log when code review runs on the same model as development.

Core contract:

• Every sub-skill runs in a fresh subagent (clean LLM context)
• Sub-skill subagents run autonomously but relay "decision needed" questions back to you for the user
• Code review subagents MUST use a different LLM model than the development subagents
• On any failure: halt with resume instructions — re-invoking with the same epic number picks up where it left off
• sprint-status.yaml is the checkpoint — story statuses determine what's been done and what remains
• Interactive by default: report progress after each story, soft gates between phases
• Phase A (story specs) parallelizes by dependency layer via concurrent subagents
• Phase B (implementation) parallelizes by dependency layer via git worktrees — each story gets its own branch and working directory, merged back after review

On Activation

Load available config from {project-root}/_bmad/config.yaml and {project-root}/_bmad/config.user.yaml (root level and bmm section). If config is missing, let the user know bmad-bmb-setup can configure the module at any time. Use sensible defaults for anything not configured.

Resolve:

• implementation_artifacts — where story files and sprint-status.yaml live
• planning_artifacts — where epic source files live
• user_name, communication_language

Intent guard: Before proceeding, confirm the user intends full epic orchestration. If the input looks like a single story reference (e.g., "13.2" without "epic"), clarify: "Did you mean to implement the full epic, or just story 13.2? For a single story, use bmad-dev-story instead."

Then read fully and follow ./references/phase-logic.md.