What it is
Refinement turns a rough note into a ready-to-start task. You write down whatever you have — an idea, a bug report, a pasted chat — and Sightdeck AI fills in the structure for you: title, summary, Type, time estimate and Story Points. Large or mixed requests are split into separate tasks automatically, so you never have to break the work down by hand first.
What you get
- No more 30-minute refinement session before every sprint. You write it down, Sightdeck AI structures it.
- Every task arrives with title, summary, Story Points, time estimate and Type — ready to start.
- Story Points are estimated from your project's own finished tasks, not from a fixed scale — see AI Learning.
- Large requests are auto-broken into manageable tasks: independent pieces ("fix login and update the changelog") become separate roots, related pieces ("design + frontend + backend + tests") become an Epic parent with subtasks.
- Quick-Add: dump two sentences in, get a finished task out — even between other tasks.
How you use it
- Drop the idea into the Quick-Add field at the top of the backlog — type or paste it, one sentence is enough.
- Sightdeck AI creates the task in
backlogright away and refines it in the background. The card shows a Refining… pill while this runs — there is no proposal to approve first. - When the pill clears, title, summary, Type, estimate and Story Points are filled in. Click the card to edit any of them.
- Reorder by drag & drop — most important tasks to the top.
Reorder by priority
The order of the backlog is your priority list, and you set it by hand. Grab a task by the drag handle (the dots on the left of the row) and drop it where it belongs — top means highest priority. The order saves on its own.
That order is not just cosmetic: Bulk Start launches tasks top to bottom, and when you ask the agent to "take what's on top" it picks from there too. Cluster suggestions and refinement never reshuffle what you sorted — your manual order stays put.
Folding the long lists away
On a project with a few hundred tasks, the Backlog, Up Next and Done groups are the ones that push everything else off screen. Each carries a caret next to its heading — click it (or focus it and press Enter) and the list body folds away.
- They fold independently, and each one's state is remembered across restarts.
- Only the list body hides. The group header stays: its name, its count, the tag filter and sort selector on Backlog, the Today / 2 days / 7 days recency selector on Done — so the controls do not disappear along with the rows.
- It is purely a view state, like the filters — nothing in your task file changes, and a collapsed Backlog is still where a new or queued task lands.
Refine Ticket — and split
A task that already sits in the backlog can be reshaped later: open its details, hit Refine Ticket (in the menu next to the main action), type the new wording. Refinement rewrites title, summary, estimate and Story Points in the background.
The new wording can also bundle several independent pieces. Refinement then splits: your original task survives with its ID and history and becomes the first piece; every other piece appears next to it as its own new peer task. No parent/child structure from the split. If the pieces only make sense together as one bigger goal, refinement keeps a single task and recommends Planning Mode instead.
Starting an unrefined task
A task without a type yet shows as Unclassified. Its primary action is Start Refinement — refinement classifies Type, estimate and Story Points and rewrites title and summary before you run it.
For the rare case where refinement does nothing (the provider unreachable, a stalled run, no time to wait), the task's details show a secondary Start without Refinement button right next to it. An unclassified task is never a dead end.
When refinement fails
When the background refinement call breaks — timeout, missing command, malformed response — Sightdeck AI clears the refining chip immediately instead of leaving you staring at it, and says so in a quiet toast rather than a popup you have to dismiss. Nothing is lost: the task keeps the text you typed as its title and stays unclassified.
From there, Restart Refinement on the card tries again, or Start without Refinement runs the task as it stands. The reason for the failure is recorded in the task's history, so you can still look it up after the toast is gone.
Why it failed, and imported tickets
A failed refinement names the actual reason — including a plain not logged in when that is what happened — instead of one generic notice. The reason also stays on the task's history, so a failure you walked away from is still readable afterwards.
A task imported from a ticket shows a live Refining… indicator while refinement classifies it in the background. If it is already classified and only the background pass is still running, the task's details offer Start right away — you do not have to wait for refinement to finish before working the task.