ticketscli has just gotten some quality-of-life workflow enhancements to make the agent do a little more of the work while making it easier for the developer to stay in charge without getting overloaded. The general theme is trying to reduce cognitive overload.

At work at Microsoft i’m usually running two to four VS Code instances in parallel on different projects. I try to get them working on large but well-defined pieces of work so they don’t need constant tending. The challenge is remembering and keeping up with what’s going on with big changes being made across multiple projects simultaneously, and being sure I’m happy with what the agents have done.

Recently I’ve started asking the agents to walk me through things step-by-step both for reviewing planned work as well as work done. This has been helpful and it’s the common theme of the improvements made to ticketscli this past weekend.

Screenshots below are from OpenCode on Linux (on my phone) but the skills should work the same way on other harnesses. I’m testing with GitHub Copilot in VS Code at work this week.

Review Ticket Skill is now More Helpful

The review ticket skill now provides more formalized feedback with proposed options for each issue.

Review Ticket offering a step-by-step walkthrough of its findings
Review Ticket now offers you a step-by-step walkthrough of it's findings.

More importantly: as the issue report still tends to be a wall of text, in keeping with the theme for this release the skill now offers to walk you through the issues and options one-by-one to make your decision-making process a little easier.

Options for addressing an issue during the walkthrough
For each issue it offers you options or let's you take a custom action.

Human Verification in Execution Plan

After a long agent session I sometimes find myself struggling to know how exactly to do my own verification of the work or even just a smoke test. It’s all very well for the agent to check it’s own work and write it’s own unit test suite, but I want to try it myself to see it working but also to check that im happy with the aesthetics and direction we’re going.

To make this easier the execution plan skill now defines human verifications for each phase and provides step-by-step instructions including copy-pasteable commands.

Execution Plan skill now prepares human verifications with step-by-step instructions and copy-pasteable commands.
Execution Plan skill now prepares human verifications with step-by-step instructions and copy-pasteable commands.

Assist Verification Skill

This new skill layers on top of the human verifications that are now defined in the execution plan, and walks you through the pending verifications for completed phases one-by-one.

The skill identifies pending human verifications for completed phases and offers to guide you through each one.
The skill identifies pending human verifications for completed phases and offers to guide you through each one.
The skill gives you step-by-step instructions for conducting the verification including copy-pasteable commands.
The skill gives you step-by-step instructions for conducting the verification including copy-pasteable commands.

Assist Commit Skill

This new skill is intended to reduce the effort needed to make clean and properly organized commits, especially for a large pending change set produced by an agent that may contain logically distinct sub pieces of work, while still keeping the human in the loop.

This skill reviews the pending changes and proposes ticket-aware commits.

The skill reviews the pending changes and proposes commits to group them cleanly and logically.
The skill reviews the pending changes and proposes commits to group them cleanly and logically.

After getting user confirmation it stages each approved commit and shows a suggested commit message with a copyable command the developer can execute. It also offers to just execute the commit for you,

The skill gives you the copy-pasteable commit command but also offers to do the commit for you.
The skill gives you the copy-pasteable commit command but also offers to do the commit for you.

That’s it for this release of ticketscli and there’s more in the pipeline that will land in future updates.