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Dependency Intelligence

ticket (tk) treats task dependencies as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), so tk ready can compute the next actionable work deterministically.

How Dependencies Work

When ticket B depends on ticket A (deps: [A] in B's frontmatter):

  1. B is blocked while A is open or in_progress.
  2. tk ready lists B only after A is closed; until then tk blocked lists it with its blockers.
  3. Closing A unblocks B with no further action.
Relation Field Blocks? Command
Dependency deps Yes tk dep <id> <dep-id>
Link links (symmetric) No tk link <id> <id> [id...]
Parent/subtask parent No tk create --parent <id>, tk update <id> --parent <id>

Adding Dependencies

# The API ticket must close before the UI ticket is ready
tk dep web-ui3k9a api-7f2c1d

Both IDs must exist; tk dep exits 1 if either is not found.

Cycle Detection

tk dep rejects a self-dependency and any dependency that would close a loop, printing the cycle and exiting 1 without writing. The check covers closed tickets too.

tk dep api-7f2c1d web-ui3k9a
# Error: api-7f2c1d -> web-ui3k9a would create a cycle: api-7f2c1d -> web-ui3k9a -> api-7f2c1d

Cycles can still appear through hand edits or Git merges. Run tk dep cycle to report them among open tickets; tickets in a cycle never become ready until one edge is removed with tk undep.

tk dep cycle
# Cycle 1: web-ui3k9a -> api-7f2c1d -> web-ui3k9a

Viewing Dependency Trees

tk dep tree web-ui3k9a          # repeated subtrees are shown once
tk dep tree --full web-ui3k9a   # disable deduplication

Ready Queue for Agents

Many agents can share one queue. Each takes a ready ticket and claims it atomically:

tk ready -T backend                              # pick a candidate
tk start api-7f2c1d --claim --assignee agent-2   # exit 3 if someone else claimed it first

A claim that loses the race exits 3; pick another ticket from tk ready. See Command Reference.