In everyday life
It is like moving house one room at a time: each room is packed, moved and unpacked before the next, so each evening one more room works. Packing every box first leaves nothing usable until the end.
One case
A developer asks an agent to “build table booking” for a restaurant app in one session. Five hours in, the agent has a database table, half of the server code and no screens, and its window is full. The table and the server code can be tested on their own, but no guest can book a table from start to end, and the next session starts by reading 2,000 lines of half-built code.
Cutting a large piece of work into small tickets, each small enough for one agent session and each with its own checks. Each ticket also names the tickets that must finish before it.
Every case
An agent does its best work on a task that fits in one fresh window and ends in something it can check. A big task breaks both: the window fills before the end, and the feature cannot be checked from start to end until every layer is done. Good tickets are thin slices through every layer, such as “a guest can book one table for one time”, not “build the database”. Each ticket lists its blockerA ticket that must be finished before another ticket can start. tickets, so the ones with none can run at the same time.
The word
Engineers call this
Before a big build, split it into tickets that each fit one session, work from start to end, and say how to check them. Start any ticket whose blockers are done.