I Built an AI Agent to Do My Pre-Refinement. It Turned Into a Mirror of How We Wrote Tickets.

1 hour. Seven hours. Same ticket, same prompt, two days apart. The agent wasn't broken. It was showing me what my team had been doing silently for years. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The setup Most teams I've worked on have a stage between "product writes a ticket" and "the team estimates it" — pre-refinement, grooming, technical intake, different names for the same homework. A developer reads the ticket before the team meeting, opens the design tool, searches the repos for similar components, and leaves a technical comment: what already exists, what needs to be built, files involved, an hour estimate, open questions. Then the team meets and estimates. Without that homework, the meeting becomes the homework. Fifteen minutes stretches to forty-five. That homework cost me about a day and a half per sprint. Not glamorous. Not particularly hard. Mostly reading, searching, context-switching, and a lot of "I swear we built something like this six months ago, where is it