jpicklyk/task-orchestrator

Overview

This skill completes or cancels multiple work items in bulk to close out features, archive finished workstreams, or clean up stale tasks. It guides scope selection, previews impact, enforces gate checks (unless cancelling), executes the batch transition, and reports exact success/skip reasons. Designed to handle active-item warnings, dependency skips, and optional post-completion deletion.

How this skill works

First, it identifies the scope from a UUID, title fragment, or a list of items drawn from conversation context or search results. Next, it previews the impact by counting items by role (queue, work, review, terminal) and prompts the user when active items exist. For a complete trigger it runs gate checks against required notes and offers choices to fill notes, switch to cancel, or proceed with gated items skipped. Finally, it calls the complete_tree operation with trigger="complete" or "cancel", parses the response into applied/skipped outcomes, and optionally deletes completed items if the user confirms.

When to use it

• Close out everything under a feature or root item (cascade completion)
• Bulk-complete a set of specific items by IDs or titles
• Cancel and archive an abandoned or deprecated workstream
• Clean up stale or old items to reduce clutter
• Force-close active work when you explicitly want to cancel instead of completing

Best practices

• Search by a title fragment first if you don’t have a UUID to avoid acting on the wrong scope
• Always review the Impact Preview before executing to understand active items and terminal counts
• Prefer trigger="complete" for genuine, finished work; use trigger="cancel" only for abandonment or force-closing
• If gate warnings appear, either fill required notes using manage_notes or switch to cancel intentionally—don’t ignore gate guidance
• For large item lists (10+), use filtered search instead of individual gets to improve performance

Example use cases

• Finish an entire feature subtree after verification and close all descendant tasks
• Cancel a scoped feature that will no longer be implemented and mark all items cancelled
• Clean up project backlog by bulk-completing terminal and queue items that are finished
• Force-complete specific items listed by UUIDs when you want to close a set of tasks
• Archive a completed workstream by completing then deleting the root and its descendants after confirmation