Paperclip — Converting Plans to Tasks

A companion skill for turning a plan into executable Paperclip work. It does not dictate a plan structure — bring whatever format fits the work and the user's preference. It tells you how to translate that plan into issues so that the rest of Paperclip works for you.

For the mechanics of recording a plan (issue document with key plan, comment links, approval gating, who to reassign back to), follow the Planning section of the paperclip skill. This skill covers planning method, not the API surface.

When you're asked to plan

Plan deeply. Capture as much real detail as you have: goals, constraints, unknowns, success criteria, risks. A shallow plan becomes rework downstream — assignees can only act on what they can read.
Minimize the issue graph. Use as few tasks as possible while still completing and verifying the job. Prefer one end-to-end task with one owner over separate tasks for each step, file, component, or phase. Keep those structural details as checklists or acceptance criteria inside the owning task unless a real execution boundary requires another issue.
Split only for a qualifying boundary. Create a separate subtask only when at least one of these applies:
- A different specialist, owner, permission boundary, or external actor must own the work.
- A self-contained deliverable can usefully run in parallel with other work.
- A hard dependency or handoff needs its own blockedByIssueIds lifecycle.
- A review, QA pass, or governed approval gate has an independent owner.
- Substantial follow-up work needs independent tracking or retry because it cannot safely be completed and verified in the parent.
Know your team. Before assigning anything, look up the company's agents and their specialties (reporting lines, role descriptions, prior work). Don't default work to yourself when a better-suited agent exists; don't assign to a name you haven't checked.
Assign for specialty. Hand each piece of work to the agent most relevant to it. If no one fits, call that out — a hire, a tool, an external dependency, a board decision — instead of papering over the gap.
Take responsibility. Specialty-matching cuts both ways: when you are the best-suited agent for a piece of work, assign it to yourself instead of reflexively delegating. Don't hand off to avoid load.
Use the dependency tree. Paperclip's executor automatically starts any assigned task with no open blockers. Parent/child issue nesting is structure, not execution blocking. Express each qualifying ownership or lifecycle boundary as an issue; keep other concrete deliverables within the responsible issue's description, checklist, or acceptance criteria. Wire every hard dependency between issues through blockedByIssueIds on the dependent issue (not prose like "blocked by X"). When a blocker reaches done, dependents auto-wake.
Order, then parallelize. Sequence work by real dependencies, not by personal preference. Create parallel branches only for qualifying, self-contained work, then start those independent branches in parallel. Unlike humans, most agents allow concurrent runs, so you can assign parallel work to the same agent.
Write review tasks for the reviewer's boundary. A review/QA task must tell the delegate to post findings on their own review issue and mark it done — the verdict is the deliverable, and adverse findings are still done, not blocked. Never instruct a delegate to comment on the parent issue (low-trust reviewers are guaranteed a 403 there), and make the description self-contained since the reviewer may not be able to read your issue. Wire the dependent issue's blockedByIssueIds to the review issue so the verdict wakes the right owner.
Enough is enough. Plans exist to unblock execution, not replace it. If the next step is small and clear, just do it or allow the plan to stand on its own. Re-planning a plan, or splitting work that one agent could finish in the time it took to break it up, is procrastination — ship something.

When converting an accepted plan into tasks

Start from one end-to-end task and add issues only for the qualifying boundaries above. Before creating tasks, write a compact task matrix with each proposed task, owner, initial status, blockers, and the specific qualifying reason it must be separate. Any task that can start immediately should say why it has no blockers; otherwise set it to blocked and include the prerequisite issue IDs in blockedByIssueIds. Do not rely on parentId, child ordering, phase labels, or prose to block execution.

Run a merge-back pass before publishing or creating the graph. Require every proposed subtask to name at least one qualifying reason from this skill. If it cannot, merge it into its parent or an adjacent task and preserve the work as an internal step, checklist item, or acceptance criterion. Repeat until every remaining issue has a real ownership, scheduling, lifecycle, or governance reason to exist.

After creating the tasks, re-fetch the created issues or otherwise verify the issue graph before marking the source planning issue done. Confirm that every separate issue still has its qualifying reason, each dependent task has the expected blockedByIssueIds, each independent task has an explicit "can start now" reason, review tasks respect the reviewer's write boundary, and the parent/child hierarchy is only being used for traceability. If the graph contains an unjustified split or expected blockers are missing, correct it or report the mismatch and leave the planning issue in in_review or blocked until the graph is fixed.

Quick checklist before you publish a plan

What this skill is not

Not a plan template. Use any format — prose, outline, table, RACI, Gantt, whatever fits.
Not software-development–specific. The same rules apply to marketing, research, ops, design, hiring, finance, etc.
Not a replacement for the paperclip skill's planning mechanics. Use both.