ticket-lifecycle

Ticket lifecycle — the tracker is the control plane

A queue-driven flow only works when humans and agents coordinate somewhere durable, and that somewhere is the issue tracker. A ticket records the problem, the scope, the acceptance criteria, the decisions, and the evidence; a tiny set of markers records who authorized what. This skill is the one home for those rules, so the three ticket workflows, the dispatcher, and five tracker backends cannot drift apart on what a claim means or what a priority is worth.

Two ideas carry the whole design. The ticket is the spec — everything downstream inherits its precision. And the human is the trigger — there is no daemon polling anything, so every pass is authorized by a person and gated by a person.

How to apply this

Load this before touching any ticket. Then, in order: resolve the tracker (section 1), read the resolved adapter for the mechanics (section 2), and run your workflow's own pass under the rules in sections 3 through 9. A workflow never names tracker mechanics itself — it names an operation and lets the resolved adapter supply the command.

1. Resolve the tracker before anything else

Resolution order, first hit wins:

1. .sonu/factory-config.md in the repo root — the per-repo choice, committed so the whole team shares it.
2. ~/.sonu/factory-config.md — the cross-repo default for someone who uses one tracker everywhere.
3. Neither exists → stop and tell the user to run /sonu:factory init. Never guess a tracker.

CONFIG=""
if [ -f .sonu/factory-config.md ]; then CONFIG=".sonu/factory-config.md"
elif [ -f "$HOME/.sonu/factory-config.md" ]; then CONFIG="$HOME/.sonu/factory-config.md"
fi
# Three outcomes, never two — a config that exists but cannot be read must NOT
# report "no config" (that message sends the user to re-init a file they have).
if [ -z "$CONFIG" ]; then
  echo "STOP: no factory config — run /sonu:factory init"
elif [ -s "$CONFIG" ] && sed -n '2,/^---$/p' "$CONFIG"; then
  echo "config: $CONFIG"
else
  echo "STOP: config exists at $CONFIG but is empty or could not be read — fix it before running a pass"
fi