2026-08-30

PRD to stories without a ticket graveyard

The usual setup: a PRD in Notion, tickets in Linear, the agent in Cursor. Three contexts. The agent implements a paragraph that is two weeks stale. The ticket description was typed once and never opened again. That is a graveyard with better typography.

Hand-crafting a backlog is the old job. Someone copies the spec into issues until they are tired, then the rest of the PRD lives as folklore.

Write, then snapshot

In Beck you write living pages in Documents. Nested markdown. Autosave. Two people — or a person and an agent — cannot silently overwrite each other. The agent can co-write. It does not Plan it unless you ask. That is the difference between a co-writer and a runaway planner.

Plan it snapshots the pages you select into an epic spec. You can still edit that spec. Breakdown produces pointed stories with acceptance criteria. You import to the icebox or the backlog. The agent does not import.

After Plan it, the documents keep moving. The epic is a checkpoint, not a live bind. Re-plan when you want a new snapshot. Do not expect the stories to rewrite themselves from a heading change.

Icebox is how you avoid the graveyard

If the stories are not ready, they park. The backlog is allowed work. Agents pull from what you allowed, not from every sentence in the PRD.

Notion is not the villain. The split is. If your spec and your queue are different products, the agent will pick one and ignore the other.

Credit costs if you use Beck’s AI: breakdown 10, expand 5, a question 2. Your own keys skip credits. The loop is the same either way.

How it works is the five steps. Getting started is the path through a new workspace.

A PRD you can break down more than twice. Then the list is the product again.