The plan agent turns a goal, a PRD or meeting notes into a roadmap of epics, milestones and issues, and creates those issues in Linear or Jira with acceptance criteria and a target factory.
Before you plan
- Create a project that groups the factories involved, for example "Customer portal" with
webapp,apiandmobile. See Portfolio and projects. - Make sure the first factory in the project has an agent with
agentType: PLAN:
---
agentType: PLAN
description: Turns goals and PRDs into roadmaps
---
Split the goal into epics that can ship on their own.
Give every issue testable acceptance criteria and the factory that should build it.Make a plan
Give Kiln:
- a goal, one sentence, such as "Self-serve billing",
- optionally a PRD in Markdown,
- optionally notes, such as a meeting transcript.
Kiln runs the plan agent with the goal, the PRD, the notes and the list of the project's factories. The agent returns epics in its result file (see Harnesses). Each epic has a title, a milestone, the epics it depends on, and issues with a title, body, acceptance criteria and target factory.
If the factory has no PLAN agent, or the agent returns no epics, Kiln reads the PRD as structured Markdown instead:
| In the PRD | Becomes |
|---|---|
## Heading |
An epic, with milestones M1, M2, … in order |
Depends on: Epic A, Epic B |
The epic's dependencies |
### Heading or a top-level bullet |
An issue |
A nested bullet or a line starting with AC: |
An acceptance criterion of that issue |
[api] or @api in an issue title |
Sends the issue to that factory instead of the first one |
| Other text under an issue | The issue's body |
Criteria are numbered AC1, AC2, …. An issue without criteria gets a default one in "Given … when … then …" form, which you should replace.
What gets created
When a tracker is connected, Kiln creates:
- one issue per epic, labeled
epic, with the goal, the milestone and its dependencies, - one child issue per item, with its body, an "Acceptance criteria" checklist, a
factory:<alias>label and a "Factory: @" line.
In Linear the child issues are sub-issues of the epic. In Jira the epic is a Task and the items are Sub-tasks.
In Linear, Kiln creates any missing labels on the team.
The roadmap is saved on the project with links to every issue.
From roadmap to work
Each issue names its factory, so it can flow into that factory's automations. For example, an automation that triggers on issue_created with a labels: [factory:webapp] filter turns each new issue into a work item for webapp. You can also hold issues back, and start work later with a Linear agent session or by mentioning the factory's alias in a comment.
Weekly digest
Kiln can produce a digest per person of the decisions waiting on them, oldest first, with each item's age in hours and a link to it in the inbox.