linear_breakdown

A workflow for splitting an oversized Linear issue into smaller software tickets. Linear is a tool for tracking work, and each resulting ticket is meant to be independently shippable and testable.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to decompose a large Linear issue into roughly three to seven child tickets, link them to the parent, identify dependencies, and plan the delivery sequence.
Why use it?
It turns a broad request into clear pieces with scope, acceptance criteria, estimates, dependencies, and an order of work. This helps a team see what can be delivered first and what is on the critical path.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/tarekkharsa/agentstack/breakdown
Any agent
npx skills add Tarekkharsa/agentstack --skill breakdown
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Tarekkharsa/agentstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 367 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 $0.00025 $0.00367
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00183
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00073
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00037

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2a247a0d111f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

linear_breakdown 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 2d 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.

crates/cli/catalog/skills/linear/breakdown/SKILL.md · 38 lines

What it actually says

Linear Breakdown

Unofficial, agentstack-authored. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Linear.

Use this skill when a Linear issue is too big to ship in one pass and needs to be split into smaller tickets a team can pick up independently.

Workflow

  1. Read the parent issue end to end. Pull out the user-facing outcome, the acceptance criteria, and any constraints (deadlines, owners, affected areas).
  2. Decompose by shippable slice, not by layer. Each child ticket should be something that can land and be verified on its own — avoid "backend ticket" + "frontend ticket" pairs that only make sense merged.
  3. For every child ticket, write:
    • a title in imperative voice ("Add X", "Migrate Y"),
    • a one-line outcome and explicit acceptance criteria,
    • a rough size (S / M / L) — split anything that reads as L,
    • dependencies on sibling tickets, if any.
  4. Order the tickets so the first one delivers value or unblocks the rest. Flag the critical path.
  5. Link every child back to the parent and keep the parent as the tracking issue.

Conventions

  • Prefer 3–7 children. More than that usually means the slices are too thin.
  • Each child should be mergeable within roughly a day of focused work.
  • Never invent acceptance criteria the parent does not support — ask instead.

When using the Linear MCP, create the parent's sub-issues rather than detached issues, and set the team/project to match the parent so the breakdown stays grouped.

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. 2d ago First seen · 38 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 2a247a0d111f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

linear_breakdown is a skill published in the GitHub repository Tarekkharsa/agentstack (3 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 367 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-08-31.