dagster-io/erk
Overview
This skill helps teams create and manage objectives—human-first coordination documents for goals that span two or more plans or PRs. It defines a clear roadmap, enforces an action-comment changelog, and keeps a single source-of-truth body that shows current status. Use it to track progress, surface lessons learned, and coordinate multi-plan work without converting the objective into executable plan metadata.
How this skill works
The skill provides a lightweight template and workflow: create an objective issue with a Goal, Design Decisions, Roadmap, and Current Focus. Each completed activity is recorded as an action comment (what was done, lessons learned, roadmap updates), and the issue body is updated to reflect new statuses. For implementation steps, spawn erk-plans that reference the objective; objectives remain human-readable coordination artifacts rather than machine-parsed plans.
When to use it
- When a feature or effort requires 2+ PRs or plans
- For refactors that span multiple modules or teams
- When you need to capture lessons learned across related work
- To coordinate a long-running strategic initiative that emits many plans
- When you want a single, human-readable source of truth for progress and decisions
Best practices
- Keep the objective body concise and authoritative—treat it as the source of truth
- Log every significant action as a comment using the action template (date, PR, phase, lessons)
- Follow steelthread-first: start each phase with a minimal vertical slice
- Size sub-phases so each corresponds to a single coherent PR
- Always update the issue body after posting an action comment (two-step update)
- Make lessons first-class: include learnings in every action to aid future sessions
Example use cases
- Implementing a new feature that requires frontend, backend, and infra PRs
- Coordinating a multi-phase refactor across several repositories
- Running a cross-team migration that emits multiple implementation plans
- Organizing a long-term product direction that will spawn many erk-plans
- Documenting post-mortem lessons and roadmap changes during a multi-PR rollout
FAQ
Objectives are human-readable coordination documents tracking multiple plans/PRs; erk-plans are single executable implementation artifacts with machine-oriented metadata.
What belongs in an action comment?
Date, PR link, phase/step, concise description of what was done, lessons learned, and any roadmap updates. Then update the issue body.
8 skills
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