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The canonical build chain is grill-with-docs → to-prd → to-issues → implement, with tdd as the red-green loop implement drives internally rather than a chain step of its own. - Update the chain diagram on grill-with-docs, to-prd, to-issues, and tdd. - Reframe tdd's "Where it fits": it's the engine inside the implement step, still independently reachable, no longer the terminal. - Point to-prd and to-issues at implement as the thing that builds the tickets, giving implement the inbound links it previously lacked. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Quickstart:
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=to-issues
npx skills update to-issues
What it does
to-issues breaks a plan, spec, or PRD into a set of independently-grabbable issues and publishes them to your project's issue tracker, in dependency order.
Every issue 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 the resulting tickets safe to hand to independent agents.
When to reach for it
You invoke this by typing /to-issues — 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 an agent can pick up. Point it at the conversation, or pass an existing 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-prd.
Prerequisites
to-issues publishes into your issue tracker, so setup-matt-pocock-skills must have configured the tracker and its triage label vocabulary for this repo first. It applies the ready-for-agent triage label itself as it publishes.
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-issues 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, dependencies, what to merge or split) before writing anything, and publishes blockers first so each issue's "Blocked by" field can reference a real ticket.
Where it fits
to-issues is a step in the main build chain:
grill-with-docs → to-prd → to-issues → implement
It sits between to-prd, which hands it a settled spec with user stories to slice against, and implement, which builds each independently-grabbable issue, driving tdd internally to write the tests test-first. When you're unsure which skill or flow fits, ask-matt routes you.