Work Items

Work item skills capture work — features, bugs, tasks, spikes, and epics — as structured documents in meta/work/ that feed into planning. The filename prefix defaults to a 4-digit number (meta/work/0042-add-search.md) but is configurable via work.id_pattern and work.default_project_code. The work.integration key selects an optional remote tracker (jira or linear today); when unset, everything stays local with no external API calls. See Issue Trackers for the integrations.

existing docs (specs, PRDs, notes)
       │
       ├── extract-work-items ──┐
       │                     ↓
       create-work-item ──→  meta/work/  ←── update-work-item
                              │
                              ├── list-work-items ──┬──→  review-work-item → meta/reviews/work/
                              │                     └──→  create-plan → implement-plan
                              └── sync-work-items ⇄ remote tracker (Jira/Linear)

Capturing work

Two ways in: create-work-item interactively drafts a single well-formed item (and can enrich an existing one), while extract-work-items mines a batch from existing documents — specs, PRDs, research, plans, meeting notes, design docs.

Sharpening before planning

After drafting and before planning:

• refine-work-item decomposes an item into children, enriches it with codebase context, sharpens acceptance criteria, sizes it, or links dependencies.
• review-work-item applies the Review System lenses (completeness, testability, clarity, scope, dependency).
• stress-test-work-item interrogates your assumptions interactively — scope, acceptance criteria, edge cases, dependencies. Complements review the same way stress-test-plan complements review-plan.

Managing the backlog

list-work-items filters by status, kind, priority, tag, parent, or title; update-work-item changes any frontmatter field with a diff preview (no transition enforcement); and sync-work-items reconciles meta/work/ with the configured remote tracker — run it with --preview first.

Work items share a template with YAML frontmatter (work_item_id, title, type, status, priority, parent, tags) and structured body sections; see The meta/ directory for the status lifecycle, and customise the template via /configure templates eject work-item.