The /to-tickets Skill

Quickstart:

npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=to-tickets

npx skills update to-tickets

Source

What it does

to-tickets breaks a plan, spec, or the current conversation into a set of tickets — each a tracer-bullet vertical slice — and publishes them to your configured tracker, with every ticket declaring the tickets that block it.

Every ticket is a tracer bullet — a thin vertical slice that cuts through all integration layers end-to-end (schema, API, UI, tests), never a horizontal slice of one layer. A completed slice is demoable or verifiable on its own, which is what makes each ticket safe to hand to an agent.

When to reach for it

You invoke this by typing /to-tickets — the agent won't reach for it on its own.

Reach for it once you have an agreed plan or a written spec and you want it split into tickets. Point it at the conversation, or pass a spec or issue reference and it fetches the body and comments first. If the change hasn't been written up as a spec yet, produce one first — for that, use to-spec.

Prerequisites

to-tickets publishes into your issue tracker, so setup-matt-pocock-skills must have configured the tracker and its triage label vocabulary for this repo first. On a real tracker it applies the ready-for-agent label as it publishes.

One artifact, two readings

The blocking edges are the whole point. They make one set of tickets read two ways, depending on the tracker:

• Local files → a single tickets.md in the repo root, the edges written as text. You work it top-to-bottom, by hand, staying in the loop.
• A real tracker (GitHub, Linear) → one issue per ticket, the edges as native blocking links (or sub-issues). Any ticket whose blockers are all done is on the frontier and can be grabbed — so several agents can run at once.

The edges live in the ticket regardless of medium; the medium only decides whether anything acts on them in parallel. to-tickets produces the artifact — how you run it (sequential by hand, or a parallel fleet) is up to you.

Vertical slices, not horizontal ones

The whole skill turns on one distinction. A horizontal slice ships one layer of the change — all the schema, or all the API — and nothing works until every layer lands. A vertical slice, the tracer bullet, ships one narrow path through every layer at once, so it can be demoed the moment it's done.

Before slicing, to-tickets looks for prefactoring — "make the change easy, then make the easy change" — and orders that work first. It then quizzes you on the breakdown (granularity, blocking edges, what to merge or split) before publishing anything, and publishes blockers first so each ticket's "Blocked by" can reference a real ticket.

The wide-refactor exception

One shape breaks the tracer-bullet rule: a wide refactor — a single mechanical change (rename a column, retype a shared symbol) whose blast radius fans across the whole codebase, so one edit breaks thousands of call sites at once and no vertical slice can land green. to-tickets slices it as expand–contract instead: expand (add the new form beside the old so nothing breaks), migrate (move call sites over in batches sized by blast radius, one ticket per batch, CI green throughout because the old form still exists), then contract (delete the old form once no caller remains). When even the batches can't stay green alone, they share an integration branch that all block a final integrate-and-verify ticket, and green is promised only there.

Where it fits

to-tickets is a step in the main build chain:

grill-with-docs → to-spec → to-tickets → implement → code-review

It sits between to-spec, which hands it a settled spec with user stories to slice against, and implement, which builds each ticket, driving tdd internally to write the tests test-first, before its code-review pass. Work the frontier one ticket per fresh context, clearing between them. When you're unsure which skill or flow fits, ask-matt routes you. </content>