Story: Suggest the next work item to pick up

Table of Contents

This page documents a story in Sprint 20. It captures the goal, current status, acceptance criteria, and the tasks that compose it.

Goal

A new compass command, compass heading, recommends the next logical work item to pick up, ranked by priority. It synthesises signals across the local journal and the other worktrees' journals (the fleet), the state of sprint stories and tasks (in-flight, blocked, ready-to-close, drift), and the available captures in the inbox and next product-backlog buckets, and returns a prioritised, LLM-consumable list of suggestions — each with a score, a one-line rationale for why it is suggested now, and the ids/links needed to act on it. Optional positional keywords steer the ranking (e.g. compass heading compass biases toward compass-related work).

It completes the navigation arc alongside the existing commands:

bearings (where am I?) → heading (where do I go next?) → goto / story new (set off)

Status

Field Value
State DONE
Parent sprint Sprint 20
Now Nothing.
Waiting on Nothing.
Next Nothing.
Last touched 2026-06-11

Acceptance

  • compass heading prints a ranked list of candidate next work items (human-readable by default; -f json for LLM/tooling consumption).
  • Signals considered: the local journal and the other worktrees' journals; sprint story/task states (STARTED, BLOCKED, ready-to-close, and sprint drift); inbox captures; next product-backlog captures.
  • Each suggestion carries a priority score, a short "why now" rationale, and the id/link needed to act on it (start a task, pull a capture, close a drifted item, etc.).
  • Optional positional keywords bias the ranking toward matching items (by tag, title, description, or component) — e.g. compass heading compass ranks compass work higher; multiple keywords combine.
  • The output is stable and structured enough for an LLM to act on without re-parsing prose.
  • The command is documented with a recipe and placed in the compass command pillars (a decision-support pillar bridging Locate and Goto).

Tasks

Task State Start End Description
Scaffold story: Suggest the next work item to pick up DONE 2026-06-08 2026-06-08 Story scaffolding: documents, sprint wiring, and the scaffold PR.
Analyse and design the next-work-item suggester DONE 2026-06-10 2026-06-10 Design compass heading: the signal sources (journals, fleet, sprint state, backlogs), the priority/scoring model, keyword steering, output format, and which command pillar it belongs to.
Write recipe for compass heading DONE 2026-06-10 2026-06-10 Write a recipe documenting how to use compass heading: scoring model, keyword steering, JSON output, and placement in the recipe index.
Add agile-find-heading skill wrapping compass heading DONE 2026-06-11 2026-06-11 Create a Claude Code skill that runs compass heading, summarises the ranked suggestions, and recommends the next action — a session-start companion to agile-find-bearings.

Decisions

Out of scope

Emacs 29.1 (Org mode 9.6.6)