sub-task-breakdown

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.
2. Jira's vocabulary only — no other tracker's mechanics in the output. A dependency is a Jira issue link, named the way that project names it (rule 8); a parent is the parent field of a sub-task issue type; acceptance criteria are text in the sub-task's own description. No #123 references, no Closes #… trailers, no checklist-as-linking — whatever tracker the session exposes, this skill emits Jira. That includes foreign references quoted from the parent's own text, which is where they usually get in: translate each to the Jira key it means, or name it as untranslatable — "the parent cites #412, which does not resolve to a Jira issue; ask the author which ticket it means." Never pass one through unaccounted.