Investigate

• Copy acceptance criteria from the JIRA ticket into the ticket file ## acceptance criteria section
• If no acceptance criteria exist, draft them based on the ticket description and ask the user to confirm

3. STOP — gather personal context

• Ask the user if they have any additional context, constraints, or preferences
• Wait for their input before continuing

4. investigate

• Research the codebase to understand the problem space
• Identify relevant files, patterns, and dependencies
• Check for similar past implementations or related code
• Note any risks, edge cases, or dependencies on other teams/systems
• Write findings into the ## investigation section of the ticket file

5. write implementation plan

• Think at a staff engineer level — consider project/future scope, not just ticket scope
• Consider: will this approach scale? does it create tech debt? does it conflict with ongoing work?
• Break the plan into logical, atomic steps
• Each step should be independently committable
• STOP during writing to iterate with the user:
  • Present open questions and wait for answers
  • Provide suggestions where multiple approaches exist
  • Do not finalise the plan until all open questions are resolved
• Write the plan into the ## implementation plan section

6. create todos

• Convert the implementation plan into a checkbox list in ## to do
• Each todo should map to roughly one commit
• Arrange in implementation order, not importance order
• Follow TDD ordering: test first, then implementation, then refactor

7. review

• Re-read the full ticket file
• Verify: do the todos fully resolve the acceptance criteria?
• Check for inconsistencies between plan and todos
• Flag anything that looks incomplete or risky
• Present a final summary to the user