plan-to-tickets

Plan to Tickets

This skill converts a written plan into a hierarchy of tickets in a task tracker (ClickUp, Linear, Jira, Asana, Notion, GitHub Projects, etc.). It captures the durable process lessons that aren't obvious the first time you do it at scale, plus platform-specific quirks that will bite if you don't know about them.

The work is mostly mechanical — read structured input, create things, wire relationships — but two failure modes are common and expensive:

1. Wrong hierarchy depth. A 3-level hierarchy with 5 step-subtasks per task can balloon a 130-task plan into 770 tickets. Most of those step subtasks carry no information beyond the parent description and just add noise. Negotiate the depth before you create anything.
2. No ID map. Trackers return their own opaque IDs (86ahjxrh2, LIN-1234, etc.) when you create a ticket. You need those to wire dependencies later. If you don't capture them as you create each ticket, you'll have to do a second pass to look them all up — slow and error-prone.

The rest of this skill exists to make sure you don't fall into either trap and to surface the smaller gotchas (status string formats, markdown rendering, batching strategy).

Step 1: Capture intent

The operator will hand you either a planning document or point at one. Before any tool calls, confirm three things:

• Source doc — the markdown/text file. Read it before asking questions; you'll want to know task counts, phase structure, and dependency density.
• Target tracker — which system to import into (ClickUp, Linear, Jira, Asana, Notion, GitHub Projects, etc.). If the operator didn't name one, ask before doing anything else — the choice affects what's possible (status workflows, native dependencies, markdown rendering, tag semantics) and which MCP/integration is required.
• Target container — within that tracker, the specific list / project / board / repo. Get the URL or ID; ambiguity here wastes a lot of work.
• Status of items already done — if the doc has any "complete" or "in progress" callouts (e.g., prereqs already finished), confirm which to mark accordingly.