I wrote this after seeing the same pattern a few times: AI makes it easy to generate tickets that are better formatted, but not better justified.

I call them “Zombie Barbies” — tickets that look finished on the surface, but don’t clearly connect to a goal, metric, or decision.

The post is mostly practical. It covers 5 ticket templates I use for different kinds of work: feature, non-user feature, bug, spike, and chore. The argument is that a lot of ticket quality problems come from forcing very different kinds of work into the same story format.

I also included the prompt I use with MCP/LLMs to generate tickets from conversation context.