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Skill reference: kiro-tasks

Skill reference: kiro-tasks

Section titled “Skill reference: kiro-tasks”

The kiro-tasks skill authors one document genre: the tasks.md of an AWS Kiro three-document spec set. This reference describes what that document type is, how the skill produces one, when it earns its place, and the provenance and sources behind it.

PropertyValue
AuthorsThe tasks.md of a Kiro spec set
Purpose groupKiro spec set
MIF conceptTypeprocedural
Target MIF level2
Primary sourceKiro — Specs

What this document type is

Section titled “What this document type is”

tasks.md is the third and final Kiro artifact — the implementation plan that turns the design into work. It is a numbered, checkbox list of tasks, sequenced so that each builds on the last. Its defining properties are that every task is small (a self-contained increment a developer or coding agent can complete and verify), test-driven (the task names the test or behaviour that proves it is done), and traceable (it cites the design element and requirement number it implements). The checkbox form is not decoration: it makes the plan a live progress record that an agent can drive top to bottom, checking off completed work.

This document is not the requirements — the what lives in kiro-requirements — and not the design — the how lives in kiro-design. tasks.md is purely the ordered execution of that design. It carries a procedural conceptType precisely because it is a sequence of performed steps rather than an assertion of facts.

How the skill produces one

Section titled “How the skill produces one”

kiro-tasks is a genre skill: it carries the Kiro task-list pattern as durable instructions plus exemplars, and writes the artifact over a MIF floor so the result is at once a runnable plan and a machine-conformant unit.

  • Pattern, made operational. The skill encodes the constraints — small, test-driven, ordered tasks rendered as a checkbox list — and enforces that each task traces to the design and requirement it implements, refusing anti-triggered work (requirements belong in kiro-requirements; design belongs in kiro-design).
  • Test-driven by construction. Each task names the verification that closes it, so the plan doubles as an acceptance checklist rather than a vague to-do.
  • Exemplars set the bar. Like every genre in the suite it ships good-l1.md (the MIF Level-1 floor), good.md (the target level — Level 2 here), bad.md (a counter-example), and evals/evals.json. The check-exemplars gate proves good-l1.md validates at L1 and good.md at its target level.
  • MIF projection. The document is authored with MIF frontmatter (via the shared mif-frontmatter substrate) and a conceptType of procedural, reflecting that a task list is a sequence of performed steps. mif-validate proves the Markdown to JSON-LD round-trip is lossless before the document is considered done.

When it is beneficial

Section titled “When it is beneficial”

Reach for kiro-tasks once the design is settled and you want an executable plan — especially when a coding agent will do the building. Its value is that it converts a design into a sequence of small, verifiable increments, each of which a reviewer can check and an agent can complete without re-deriving the plan.

Do not use it before a design exists; the tasks have nothing to trace back to and risk encoding decisions that belong in kiro-design. Do not use it as a general project tracker — it is scoped to one feature’s spec set. The cost of the genre is keeping the task list in step with the design as it evolves, since stale tasks point at design elements that have changed.

Example

Section titled “Example”

A tasks.md for a password-reset feature lists Task 1 (“Create the reset-token model and migration — verify with a unit test asserting expiry defaults”), Task 2 (“Implement the request-link endpoint — test the 60-second send criterion and the non-disclosure path”), and so on, each as an unchecked checkbox item annotated with the design element and requirement it implements. An agent works the list in order, checking each box as its named test passes.

Provenance & citations

Section titled “Provenance & citations”