Quick Dev Chorus

Quick Dev Skill

Skip the full AI-DLC pipeline (Idea → Elaboration → Proposal → Approval) and create tasks directly. Ideal for small, well-understood work. The goal is for agents to autonomously record their development work and verify task completion through structured acceptance criteria.

Tool namespace: Chorus tools are exposed by the connected MCP server under a mcp__chorus__ prefix on dsh (e.g. mcp__chorus__chorus_create_tasks). Bare names are used below for readability — prepend mcp__chorus__ when invoking. See chorus for the full rule.

Overview

The standard AI-DLC flow ensures quality through structured planning, but adds overhead that slows down small tasks. Quick Dev provides a lightweight alternative:

check explicit task:admin permission → create/claim → implement → self-check AC → submit → independent task review → verify or hand off

Use Quick Dev when:

• Bug fixes with clear reproduction steps
• Small features (< 2 story points)
• Post-delivery patches and gap-filling after a proposal's tasks are done
• Prototype or exploratory tasks
• Urgent hotfixes that can't wait for proposal review

Do NOT use Quick Dev when:

• The feature needs a PRD or tech design document
• Multiple interdependent tasks require upfront planning
• Stakeholder elaboration is needed to clarify requirements
• The work impacts architecture or shared components significantly

For complex work, use idea-chorus + proposal-chorus instead.

Pre-Flight: Permission Check

Call chorus_checkin and inspect the active agent's effective permissions. Set canVerifyTask to true only when chorus_checkin().agent.permissions.task explicitly contains "admin" (the task:admin permission).

Never infer verification authority from the agent's name, persona, preset/role label, task ownership, or tool availability. Do not prompt the user to choose: the explicit permission determines the terminal path.

Tools

Workflow

Step 1: Create a Quick Task

acceptanceCriteriaItems is required — chorus_create_tasks rejects any task without at least one non-blank criterion (and rejects the whole batch if any task is missing them). These are also the foundation for self-checking in Step 6. Write specific, testable criteria that you can objectively verify after development. Vague AC like "works correctly" defeats the purpose; prefer "returns 200 on GET /api/foo with valid token".

chorus_create_tasks({
  projectUuid: "<project-uuid>",
  tasks: [{
    title: "Fix login redirect loop on Safari",
    description: "Safari loses session cookie after redirect...",
    priority: "high",
    storyPoints: 1,
    acceptanceCriteriaItems: [
      { description: "Login works on Safari 17+", required: true },
      { description: "Existing Chrome/Firefox behavior unchanged", required: true }
    ]
  }]
})

proposalUuid is optional:

• Omit for standalone quick tasks (bug fixes, hotfixes, exploratory work)
• Pass to attach the task to an existing proposal — useful for gap-filling, follow-up patches, or continuing work after a proposal's initial tasks are delivered

Step 2: Claim the Task

chorus_claim_task({ taskUuid: "<task-uuid>" })

Step 3: Edit Details (if needed)

Use chorus_update_task to refine the task after creation. Tasks always have AC (creation requires them), but update them when your understanding changes during development. Passing acceptanceCriteriaItems replaces the task's criteria with the provided non-empty set; omit the field to leave them unchanged (it cannot be used to clear AC).

chorus_update_task({
  taskUuid: "<task-uuid>",
  description: "Updated with more details...",
  acceptanceCriteriaItems: [
    { description: "Login works on Safari 17+", required: true },
    { description: "Added CSRF token handling", required: true }
  ],
  addDependsOn: ["<other-task-uuid>"]
})

Step 4: Start Working

chorus_update_task({ taskUuid: "<task-uuid>", status: "in_progress" })

Sub-agents: create your own session first (manual on dsh — see develop-chorus), then pass sessionUuid for attribution:

chorus_update_task({ taskUuid: "<task-uuid>", status: "in_progress", sessionUuid: "<session-uuid>" })

Step 5: Report Progress

chorus_report_work({
  taskUuid: "<task-uuid>",
  report: "Fixed Safari cookie issue:\n- Root cause: SameSite=Strict incompatible with redirect\n- Changed to SameSite=Lax\n- Commit: abc1234",
  sessionUuid: "<session-uuid>"
})

Step 6: Self-Check Acceptance Criteria

chorus_report_criteria_self_check({
  taskUuid: "<task-uuid>",
  criteria: [
    { uuid: "<ac-uuid-1>", devStatus: "passed", devEvidence: "Tested on Safari 17.2" },
    { uuid: "<ac-uuid-2>", devStatus: "passed", devEvidence: "Chrome/Firefox regression tests pass" }
  ]
})

Step 7: Submit and Run Independent Review

chorus_submit_for_verify({
  taskUuid: "<task-uuid>",
  summary: "Fixed Safari login redirect loop. Changed SameSite cookie policy. All AC passed."
})

Submitting is not final verification. Spawn the required task-reviewer skill through subagent with run_in_background: false (foreground — the call waits for the reviewer to finish, and the verdict is the VERDICT: comment it posts rather than the call's return value; your verify/reopen decision depends on it) as described in develop-chorus, and read this round's VERDICT: Task comment. (Set run_in_background: true only when you deliberately want to fan out and collect the verdict later.) PASS and PASS WITH NOTES continue. On FAIL, do not verify or hand off: fix every unresolved BLOCKER, repeat AC self-check and submission, then run a fresh independent task review.

Step 8: Permission-Aware Verification

With explicit task:admin, after every required AC self-check passes and independent review has no unresolved BLOCKER, verify and continue autonomously:

chorus_admin_verify_task({ taskUuid: "<task-uuid>" })

Without explicit task:admin, do not call the admin tool. Post an evidence-rich comment on the Task containing AC results, test evidence, the latest independent-review verdict, and the exact requested action. @mention the responsible human (prefer chorus_checkin().agent.owner) to perform admin verification, then end the current turn.

This handoff applies in interactive and headless daemon sessions. Do not send a plain-text interactive prompt, poll for the human response, or rely only on generic notifications.

Session Integration

Quick Tasks support sub-agent execution just like proposal-based tasks. Session lifecycle is manual on dsh (no SubagentStart/heartbeat/cleanup hooks):

• Main agent: create quick tasks, work them yourself, or hand task UUIDs to sub-agents
• Sub-agents: create your own session (chorus_create_session), checkin/checkout per task, pass sessionUuid to chorus_update_task / chorus_report_work, and close the session on exit — see develop-chorus for the full manual protocol

There is no team object to create: to run several quick tasks in parallel, dispatch one subagent per task with run_in_background: true, issuing them in a single message. If subagent is unavailable on your host or workers fail repeatedly, work the tasks sequentially as the main agent.

Tips

• Keep Quick Tasks small — if you need more than 2-3 tasks, consider using proposal-chorus
• Acceptance criteria are required at creation time — chorus_create_tasks rejects tasks without them. They are your self-check contract; specific, testable AC enables autonomous verification and makes the entire workflow self-contained
• Use chorus_update_task to refine tasks (including AC) after creation rather than deleting and recreating
• Pass proposalUuid to attach follow-up or gap-filling tasks to an existing proposal — this keeps related work grouped in the same project context and DAG
• Quick Tasks show up in the same project task list and DAG as proposal-based tasks
• Agents with explicit task:admin continue autonomously after AC and independent review pass; all others use the evidence-rich asynchronous human handoff

Next

• For full task lifecycle details, see develop-chorus
• For admin verification, see review-chorus
• For the standard planning flow, see idea-chorus and proposal-chorus
• For platform overview, see chorus