Misc

JSO: an agent that runs your whole dev workflow

2 min read · by John Sang · updated August 19, 2026

JohnSang16/jso on GitHub.

A real dev task isn’t just “write the code.” Done properly it’s scoping the ticket, implementing it, testing it, debugging when something breaks, and drafting the PR, every single time. Skip a step and you ship a half-workflow: unscoped, untested, or undocumented. Doing all of that thoroughly, on every ticket, is exactly the kind of tedious, repeatable work that can be automated. That’s why I built JSO.

install it and run it

claude plugin marketplace add JohnSang16/jso
claude plugin install jso@jso-marketplace

restart claude code so the skill and the jso-debugger subagent register, then just hand it a ticket like you would a teammate, no separate command to learn.

how it solves it

JSO is a terminal-native agent orchestrator: hand it a ticket, and it works through that whole loop itself, gated at every step that actually matters.

  • scopes the ticket before writing anything, using a bundled jso:scope skill, a scoping interview (one-liner, success criteria, definition of done, risks) that runs before anything substantial gets built, so you’re not guessing at requirements mid-implementation
  • implements with minimal diffs, the smallest correct change instead of a sprawling rewrite. it leans on an optional external dependency, ponytail, to enforce that lazy-build discipline in more detail and save time on diffs; if ponytail isn’t installed, JSO falls back to the same discipline built in
  • runs tests, and hands failures to jso-debugger, a separate subagent that fixes the root cause with a minimal diff and re-runs tests on its own
  • drafts the PR using real templates, not a generic one-size-fits-all summary
  • gates every risky step (spawning a parallel run, pushing, merging) behind a yes, nothing ships silently