Ticket★

A ticket (or task ticket) is a small Handoff Artifact that defines the scope of work for a single conversation session. It stands alone or acts as a child task within a larger Spec.

You create and size tickets when you:

• Break a large feature checklist down into specific sub-tasks.
• Write a GitHub issue describing a bug, listing file paths and expected behaviors.
• Coordinate parallel agents to work on independent modules at the same time.

Sizing for the Smart Zone

The defining constraint of a ticket is its size: one session.

• Too Big: If the session enters the "dumb zone" (sloppy code, repeated mistakes) before the ticket is completed, the ticket is too large. You must split it.
• Too Small: If the agent spends most of its context tokens loading compiler setups and running commands only to perform a 5-second one-line edit, the ticket is too small. You should merge it with sibling tasks.

A high-quality ticket is written for a reader with zero previous context, containing:

1. The exact Goal and expected behavior.
2. Context Pointers to the target files (e.g. src/routes/user.ts).
3. Concrete Acceptance Criteria (e.g. "The route must return a 401 error if the token is missing").

[ Master Spec ]
    ├── Ticket 1: Build User Interface (Session 1) ──► Complete
    ├── Ticket 2: Wire Up DB Queries  (Session 2) ──► Complete
    └── Ticket 3: Write Route Tests   (Session 3) ──► Complete

Field Applications & Parallel Runs

By breaking a feature down into independent tickets (tasks that don't block each other), you unlock parallelism. You can launch three separate agent containers simultaneously to work on three separate tickets, speeding up development.