Linear Plan Build

Linear issue → shipped feature

Take a Linear issue all the way to PR open, CI green, review comments addressed, and Linear updated. There is exactly one explicit checkpoint — plan approval — and even that is conditional: routine changes run straight through.

The phases below gather the Linear context and prepare git. The actual work — grilling you on the open design decisions, exploring, planning, reviewing, implementing, gating, shipping — lives in the shared build loop.

Read references/build-loop.md now. It is the body of this skill, not optional background. This file supplies the Linear bindings it asks for.

Philosophy (hold these throughout)

• A ticket is a pointer, not a specification. Requirements get negotiated in comments as often as they are written in the description. Read those first, then grill the user on what is still open — a wrong assumption costs one question here and an implementation at Step F.
• Never invent a requirement. An issue that fails to fetch, a description that is empty, an attachment nobody attached — name it and ask. An issue key is not a specification either.
• The repository is the system of record. A Linear status, a label, a blocker marked done — none of those are evidence. Confirm a dependency against git log and the code.
• No architecture is assumed. Read what this repo actually does and follow it. Never plan against a pattern it does not use, and never propose adopting one; that is a separate conversation, not a side effect of a ticket.
• Evidence beats claims. You run the gates yourself and paste their real output — a subagent reporting "tests pass" is a claim, the gate's own output is evidence. Same for CI: a run that never registered is not a green run, and an absent CI is not a green CI.
• One checkpoint, and it has to be earned. Step E stops the run only when the change's shape demands it. Stopping on a routine fix teaches the user to skim your plans; not stopping on a schema migration is how you lose them.
• Autonomy ends at the PR. Push it, open it, babysit it to green — never merge, never enable auto-complete, never deploy.
• A silent run is a run nobody trusts. Say which step you are on, what you just changed, and what you are waiting for — in plain sentences the person who wrote the ticket can follow, not in raw tool output. See § Say what you are doing in references/build-loop.md.
• A finished subissue is marked finished. Each child that is implemented, gated and pushed moves to the team's completed state as it closes. The parent is what waits on the PR.
• Keep the tracker footprint minimal. Status and comments on the issue you are building, and nothing else in Linear, ever.

Autonomy contract

• Act and self-verify by default. No option menus, no "should I proceed?" on green.
• Linear writes on this issue are pre-authorized — the status and comments of TICKET and of any subissue you actively work. Never ask permission for those, and never write anything else in Linear.
• This skill pushes branches and opens pull requests without asking. It never merges a PR, never enables auto-complete, and never deploys.
• Escalate only for the cases listed in references/build-loop.md § Escalation. Otherwise keep going.

Arguments

Parse $ARGUMENTS:

• Issue identifier — a Linear key like ABC-123, or a linear.app/<workspace>/issue/ABC-123/<slug> URL (extract the key). If absent, list the caller's assigned, unstarted-or-in-progress issues with list_issues and ask which one via AskUserQuestion.
• skip-checkpoint — or freeform "skip the plan checkpoint" / "run straight to PR". The user's opt-in for routine issues: force the Step E skip. Honor it only when explicitly given, and never over a user who asked to see a plan.

There is no brief-file or inline-description path. This skill starts from a Linear issue; if you don't have one, ask for one.

Phase 0 — Resolve the bindings and check the tooling

Two things have to hold before Phase 1. Both are cheap to check here and expensive to discover later.

0a. The Linear binding

The Linear MCP server is registered under different names in different setups, so the tool prefix varies: mcp__linear__* in some sessions, mcp__linear-server__* in others. Determine which prefix this session actually exposes and use it consistently. If neither is available, stop and say so — point the user at the Linear MCP server setup. Never infer an issue's content from its key.

Everything below names operations bare (get_issue, save_issue); prepend the prefix you resolved.

0b. The GitHub path — prerequisites

Steps H and I push a branch, open the PR and read CI through gh. Check it now: an unauthenticated gh discovered at Step H costs a full implementation before it surfaces. Report what is missing and install nothing yourself.

If gh is missing or unauthenticated, say so and ask whether to continue anyway: everything through Step G still runs, and the work would stop at the push with the branch intact. If origin is not a GitHub remote, name the host and stop — this skill's OPEN-PR and CI bindings are GitHub-only, and ado-plan-build is the sibling for Azure Repos.

Phase 1 — Gather Linear context

Run these in parallel:

1. get_issue for the key — include relations (parent, blocking, related). Note the team ID and project ID.
2. list_issues with parentId = the issue ID — the subissues.
3. list_comments — prior discussion and decisions. Requirements are frequently negotiated in comments rather than written in the description; read them before concluding anything is unspecified.
4. get_project, if the issue belongs to one — goals and scope.
5. list_cycles for the team with type: "current" — what else is in flight.

Resolve the team's real workflow states with list_issue_statuses before any status write. "In Progress", "In Review" and "Done" are conventions, not guarantees — teams rename and reorder them. Resolve three states by type, not by name: the started one for in-progress, the team's review state (typically the last started or unstarted state before completion) for in-review, and the completed one that subissues land in when they close. Say which state you picked for each. If nothing plausibly matches, pick the closest by type, name it, and continue — a status write is never worth blocking the work.

Phase 2 — Prepare the git environment

1. Default branch: git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD | sed 's@^refs/remotes/origin/@@'.
2. git fetch origin.
3. If the working tree is dirty, stop and report. Do not stash, do not discard.
4. git checkout <default-branch> && git pull --ff-only origin <default-branch>.
5. Create the feature branch. Prefer the branchName Linear itself suggests on the issue; otherwise feature/<ISSUE-KEY>-<short-slug>. The branch name must contain the Linear key. If you are already on that branch with prior work on it, stay on it and continue rather than recreating it.

Phase 3 — Present the issue summary

Print a concise summary: title, status, priority, assignee, project, current cycle, branch name, subissues (key / title / status), blocking and related issues, and the decisions buried in the comments.

Print the subissues even when there is only one — that list is what Step A asks the user to choose from, and it is the work list for the rest of the run.

Linear status is not authoritative. Flag every blocker that isn't done, and before treating a dependency as met, confirm it against git log and the code rather than against a green label.

Phase 4 — Run the build loop

Follow references/build-loop.md, Steps A → J, with these bindings.

gh pr checks --watch blocks until the checks settle, which is the right way to wait — it beats polling. If the repo has no CI configured at all, say so and skip straight to the review-comment half of Step I; an absent CI is not a green CI.

Notes

• What this skill is pre-approved to do. Read and write files in the repo, run the repo's own build/test commands, write to this Linear issue, push its branch, and open a PR. It will not merge, deploy, or touch anything else in Linear. If that is more autonomy than you want on a given ticket, run it without skip-checkpoint and stop it at the Step E checkpoint.
• The plan file. Step C writes .claude/plans/<TICKET>.md and keeps it current while the work runs — a working notebook, never staged and never committed on the skill's initiative. Step J asks what to do with it.
• Keep secrets out of the shell and the commit. Don't stage .env files, keys, or tokens, and don't echo secret values into commands, commit messages, or PR bodies.
• Deleting the plan file is the one step that asks. allowed-tools is static and <TICKET> is not, so no grant can say "this ticket's plan and no other" — a Bash(rm .claude/plans/*) would authorise deleting every other ticket's plan too. The grant is therefore absent on purpose: Step J's "Delete it" runs rm .claude/plans/<TICKET>.md, exactly that path, and costs one permission prompt. One prompt for the only destructive step in the run, right after the user chose it, is the correct trade.
• The Bash allowlist is narrowed to the subcommands this run actually uses, so a package publish, an arbitrary GitHub API mutation or an unrelated tool prompts instead of running silently. gh api is scoped to the inline-review-comment path — the one place the skill needs it. Two grants stay wide on purpose and are worth knowing about: git add/git push and npx. A glob cannot express "not -A" or "not --force", and the gate a repo defines may legitimately be npx <anything>; the controls there are the textual rules in references/build-loop.md (stage only what the item touched, never git add -A, never force-push, never merge). A team that wants a hard boundary rather than an instruction should add permissions.deny rules in settings.json — deny wins over any allowlist, including this one.
• Gate commands. The mainstream runners (make, npm/pnpm/yarn, pytest, go, cargo, dotnet, mvn/gradle, bundle, composer) are pre-approved. If your repo's gate isn't among them, run it and approve the prompt — never skip or fake a gate to avoid a permission dialog.

References

Troubleshooting