slice-the-epic

slice-the-epic is a skill for Claude Code from insideout-ai/make-it-work. It costs 168 tokens per session (3,530 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning skill that breaks a large requirement, project task or user story into smaller pieces. Each piece is written as a Given/When/Then scenario, a common format for describing expected software behaviour.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to split product requirements, project plans, epics or tickets into independently deliverable user stories.
Why use it?
It makes oversized or unclear work easier to estimate, discuss and deliver in stages. Smaller pieces allow feedback and uncertainty to be handled earlier.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the make-it-work plugin — 5 skills shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/slice-the-epic
Any agent
npx skills add insideout-ai/make-it-work --skill slice-the-epic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/insideout-ai/make-it-work

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install make-it-work, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for slice-the-epic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/slice-the-epic.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/slice-the-epic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/slice-the-epic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/insideout-ai/make-it-work/slice-the-epic.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 168 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,530 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00168 $0.03530
Opus 5 $0.00084 $0.01765
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.00706
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00353

Measured 5d ago against content hash a831886a1ca8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

slice-the-epic scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/slice-the-epic/SKILL.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Slice the Epic

Slicing is the practice of breaking a large requirement into smaller pieces ("slices") that each deliver a usable, demonstrable increment on their own. Thinner slices mean shorter cycle time, faster feedback, easier estimation, and lower risk — because uncertainty gets resolved a little at a time instead of all at once at the end. This skill turns a big, vague requirement into a set of small, well-formed user stories.

The process

Work through these steps in order. Don't treat them as a rigid checklist to recite back to the user — think of them as the reasoning a good product-minded engineer or PO would apply.

1. Understand the requirement

Get the actual requirement text. If the user gives a Jira/Confluence link or ticket ID and a connector is available, fetch it. If they paste a requirement or epic description, work from that directly.

If the requirement is reasonably concrete, proceed straight to slicing — don't interrogate the user with a round of questions just for the sake of it. Only pause to ask (one focused question at a time, not a list) when something is genuinely blocking, e.g.: the requirement has no identifiable user or workflow at all, or it mixes several unrelated features together and it's unclear which one to slice.

Also check whether the requirement is already written as a user story with its own Given/When/Then acceptance criteria (rather than a loose paragraph). If so, look at whether each existing AC could stand on its own as a slice — this is frequently the fastest and most natural path to slicing, since the seams are already drawn by whoever wrote the ACs, and it can save you from forcing one of the techniques in step 2 onto a shape that doesn't need it.

2. Pick slicing technique(s)

If step 1 turned up existing acceptance criteria that already slice cleanly on their own, you can use that directly — it doesn't need to compete with the techniques below. Otherwise, here are the techniques, listed in priority order — when more than one would work, prefer the one higher in this list:

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 130 lines · 168 tokens per session scan A a831886a1ca8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

slice-the-epic is a skill published in the GitHub repository insideout-ai/make-it-work (11 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 168 tokens to every session and 3,530 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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