Epic

How an epic works

A large piece of work rarely fits in one task. An epic gives such work a name, “In-app payments” for example, and gathers under it the smaller parts that can be delivered separately. The team then sees two levels: the single tasks on the kanban board and the topic they belong to. A feature described in a PRD often becomes one such epic.

An epic is usually not a separate piece of work to do: it is finished when its tasks are finished. The order inside an epic is another matter. It follows from which task has to wait for another, not simply from being in the epic.

When you work with AI agents, it pays to split an epic into tasks small enough for one session of a coding agent to deliver each of them whole.

Epics in featureloom

In featureloom an epic groups the plans of one project. You create it on the Epics screen with the New epic button: you type a name, say what it is about in the Description (a note for people) field and press Create epic. You file a plan under an epic with the Epic field, in the New plan window or on the plan’s screen. A plan belongs to one epic of its project or to none.

Nobody sets an epic’s state. featureloom reads it from the plans: Idea while the epic has no plans, Outlined while all of them are in the backlog, Realized once all of them are delivered, and In realization in every other case.

Dependencies between plans record the order, not epics. On the plan’s screen, in the Dependencies part, you press Add dependency. The kind Waits on… or Unlocks… says what waits on what, and Related to… is a loose link that blocks nothing. A plan that waits says so on its card, waits on INV-14 for example. Until the plans it waits on are delivered, a console won’t take it on, and an agent that asks for the next plan won’t get it. You can start it yourself in the app. featureloom accepts no dependency that would make plans wait on each other.

The Order screen, opened for one epic, lays its plans out in steps: Ready to start, After those and the ones that follow. The plan marked Bottleneck unlocks the most others, so it is a good one to start with.

An agent can create epics and plans too. Give it a meeting transcript as a file and the command with the Planner prompt. The prompt tells it to create an epic for a topic that has none yet, write plans from the project’s template and file each under its topic’s epic. Each plan should be one piece of work that a single agent session delivers whole, and the agent records the order as dependencies. For that, the person who connected the console needs the Writes plans right. The AI project management page shows a whole project run this way: the agent plans and delivers, and you decide.