Epic writer
How the agent writes your plan's epic, and how to extend it for your team.
The epic is your plan's story: one document your dev team reads, and the body your issue tracker receives when you push. This is the skill that writes it.
It is one of the four built-in skills your team can wrap.
What it does
It asks before it writes. Two to four questions it cannot answer on its own: who else touches this, what it replaces, what happens on the paths you did not mention, what is deliberately out. One round per plan. If you skip it, the agent writes the epic anyway and says which parts it assumed.
It writes the epic out in full, in the chat. Not a summary and not a list of section names. What you see is exactly what gets saved and pushed.
It ends the turn with a question you can press. The epic is not saved until you confirm that text. Ask for a change and the agent shows you the whole epic again, not a diff, because confirming a document you cannot see is not confirming.
It corrects an epic in place, later. Once the plan exists, a change is a small edit with a one-line summary, not another round of questions and another wall of markdown.
Where the shape comes from
Your epic format is a separate document, and it is yours. It decides the sections and the shapes an epic is written in. This skill decides how the conversation runs. Change the sections in Settings → Formats; add your team's own rules to the conversation with a wrapper, below.
The agent reads your format in force every time it writes, so a change you save applies to the next epic without anyone touching this skill.
Hooks
A wrapper is a company or project skill that extends this one rather than replacing it. It does not repeat the steps. It names the hooks, so it keeps working when we reword one.
| Hook | What it adds |
|---|---|
extra-questions | Questions your team always asks before an epic |
extra-sources | Sources the agent must read first, before it writes |
extra-checks | Checks to run over the epic before offering it to you |
confirm-bar | Raise what an epic must clear before it is worth confirming |
after-create | What happens once the plan exists |
A wrapper can add rules and raise the bar. It cannot lower one. If a wrapper asks the agent to skip a step this skill states, the agent follows this skill and tells you it did.
A worked wrapper
Write this under Settings → Skills. Copy it and change the parts in your own words.
Paste the body only. The settings form writes the header for you. Pasting a whole file that carries its own header gives you two, and the inner one quietly becomes body text.
Set Extends to Epic writer on the form, then paste this as the body. The pointer sentence
wrappers used to carry is gone: the field is what connects the two now.
[HOOK: extra-questions]
Ask which regulation the work falls under, and who signs it off.
[HOOK: extra-sources]
Read the regulation summary in Context before writing. Never guess an article number.
[HOOK: after-create]
Offer to run /our-readiness-pass on the first spec.Leave a hook out and that part behaves exactly as it does today. You do not have to fill all five.
Your extension reaches every epic turn. A skill that sets extends: epic-writer is merged into
this one, so the agent reads your rules and ours as one document whether it was sent here by name
or invoked by yours. See Extending a skill.
See also
- Spec writer: the same shape, one level down
- Formats: the sections and shapes an epic is written to
- Skills: what ships built in, and how wrapping works