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 headingprints a ranked list of candidate next work items (human-readable by default;-f jsonfor 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 compassranks 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. |