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Commands/conclave-story

/conclave-story

Author, refine, decompose, or retire a user story between /conclave-spec runs. Four sub-actions dispatched by the first argument:

/conclave-story new
/conclave-story edit US-NNN
/conclave-story split US-NNN
/conclave-story retire US-NNN

Every action is available in every team_mode (solo, lean, full-scrum). None commits, pushes, or opens a PR — the user runs git commit and gh pr create after reviewing.

Sub-actions at a glance

Sub-actionLLM call?Effect
newProduct Manager subagentAllocates the next monotonic US-NNN. Writes a story + acceptance file. User picks: land in backlog only, or also pull into the active sprint.
edit US-NNNProduct Manager subagentRevises a ready or backlog story per the user’s stated change. Preserves the story ID and any frontmatter fields not covered by the change.
split US-NNNProduct Manager subagentDecomposes a parent into 2, 3, or 4 children. Parent becomes status: retired with superseded_by: [US-CHILD_1, ...]. Enforces a hard scenario-coverage rule.
retire US-NNNNo LLM callMechanical frontmatter update. Sets status: retired, retirement_reason, retired_at.

new

Prompts the user (via AskUserQuestion) for:

  • Story title (free text)
  • Where should it land? — Backlog only (default), or Backlog + pull into active sprint (only offered when a sprint exists)
  • Discipline (frontend | backend | mobile | qa | design | devops | multi)
  • Priority (MoSCoW)
  • Estimate (T-shirt)

Then delegates to the PM subagent to author both a story and an acceptance file. Files land either in conclave/product/stories-backlog/US-NEW_ID-<slug>.md (backlog-only) or conclave/sprints/SPRINT-NNN/stories/US-NEW_ID-<slug>.md (pulled into sprint). The assignee field is left empty — assignment is /conclave-planning’s job.

edit US-NNN

Refuses stories past ready (in-progress / review / verified / done) with:

Story is past the ready gate. Editing acceptance criteria mid-implementation would invalidate the QA verification — surface the issue via a PR comment on the story file instead.

Prompts for the change as a free-form paragraph. The PM subagent revises the story markdown (and the acceptance markdown if criteria changed). The story ID is preserved; the file slug is stable (git tracks history through the same path).

split US-NNN

Prompts for:

  • How many splits? — 2 / 3 / 4
  • Split axis — free-form paragraph (e.g. “by user flow”, “by data layer vs UI”)

The PM subagent plans a scenario-to-child map before emitting any child block. If any parent Gherkin scenario cannot be assigned to a child under the given axis, the split is refused with a single line:

SPLIT_UNSAFE: Cannot cover parent scenario "<name>" in any proposed child. Suggest the user adjust the split axis or reduce N.

No files are written on refusal.

On success, each child gets its own story + acceptance file with split_from: US-NNN in the frontmatter. The parent is marked status: retired with superseded_by: [US-CHILD_1, US-CHILD_2, ...].

retire US-NNN

Refuses stories past ready (retiring in-progress / shipped work would be dishonest) and stories already retired.

Prompts for retirement reason as a non-empty free-form paragraph. Updates the story’s frontmatter:

  • status: retired
  • retirement_reason: <user's paragraph>
  • retired_at: <today ISO date>

No subagent call. Retirement is a policy decision the human already made; the PM has no research or authorship to add.

The retired state and cross-command exclusion

Retired stories are excluded from every command’s collection queries — /conclave-planning, /conclave-dev, /conclave-qa, /conclave-pr-review, /conclave-sprint. /conclave-spec is intentionally exempt (it authors new stories rather than collecting existing ones).

See the story state machine for the full picture including the parallel-terminal transition to retired.

Model configuration

/conclave-story uses the same model-resolution logic as every other Conclave command:

  • models.overrides.product_manager → models.default → parent session model.
  • Invalid model → WARNING: line, fall back.
  • Absent models: block → silent no-op.

See the configuration reference.

Guardrails

  • Never commits.
  • Never touches files outside conclave/product/ and (when applicable) the active sprint’s stories/ and acceptance/ directories.
  • Never dispatches multiple stories in one invocation — batch multi-story dev/QA lives in /conclave-dev and /conclave-qa since v0.6.0.
  • retire never calls the subagent — intentional design.
  • split output is validated both by the PM subagent (during generation) and by the orchestrator (post-hoc count + coverage check) as defense in depth.
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