Cut

Turn a parent spec's Children list into tickets a person or an agent can pick up cold, each one aligned just before it is built.

Origin: Anthropic's long-running harness (one user-visible feature per session) and OpenAI's ExecPlans (milestones that are independently verifiable).

Children are drafts. Their interface and tests come later, through /align <child>, because a quarter of later slices in this library's trackers changed contract after a sibling merged.

Steps

1. Read the parent ticket: its body is the spec.
2. Draft each child in the Children list: its title, a goal line a stranger could follow, up to six draft behaviour lines drawn only from the parent's Goal, Journeys and Rules, and the earlier siblings it needs. Something the parent doesn't cover is a question for the user, not a line.
3. Check each child against align's size and vertical rules, and the set against the parent: together the children walk every journey, and the last one completes them. For each child that fails, propose the fix — fold, split or reorder — with the reason. The user decides, and the parent's Children list is edited to match. Only a wrong Goal, Shape or Rules sends the parent back to needs-alignment.
4. Show the set as EXAMPLES.md does. Nothing is created before a yes.
5. Publish, in build order: each child as a sub-issue at needs-alignment, its blocking edges set as it lands. The operations are in docs/agents/issue-tracker.md.
6. Close. Rewrite the parent's Children list as a checklist of the published children, in build order, keeping the rest of its body. Drop ready-to-cut, post the session comment, and name the next act: /align <first child>.

The parent wears no label after the cut; it stays open until its last child merges.