The Quiet Chaos of Vague Tasks (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Picture this: An engineer picks up a ticket that says “Make onboarding better.”
They spend two days building a beautiful multi-step flow with illustrations, confetti, and a welcome bot… only to discover you just wanted the copy on the first screen tweaked and one missing tooltip added.
We’ve all been there. And the numbers are brutal:
- Rework due to unclear or changing requirements eats up to 40% of project budgets in many organizations.
- The Standish Group’s latest CHAOS data (2024–2025) continues to show that poor requirements remain the #1 reason projects are challenged or fail outright — still hovering around only 31% of projects being fully successful.
- In 2025 surveys, senior engineers consistently rank “constant clarification requests” as one of their top three biggest motivation killers.
And now add AI into the mix.
Give Cursor, Claude, or Copilot a fuzzy prompt and it will confidently generate 1,500 lines of perfectly formatted, completely wrong code. Recent studies show hallucinated or incorrect code suggestions can hit 42% when prompts lack context — meaning you’re not just wasting human time anymore, you’re wasting expensive tokens and introducing subtle bugs at lightning speed.
Vague task → AI amplifies the mistake 5–10× → tech debt party.
The Joyous Upside: What Happens When You Write Great Tasks
When you hand engineers a beautifully shaped task, something wonderful happens:
- They disappear for days… and come back with exactly what you wanted (often better).
- Clarification threads drop by 80–90%.
- Cycle time plummets — many Shape Up teams ship in 6 weeks what others estimate at 4–6 months.
- Seniors stay in flow, juniors level up faster, and everyone feels respected.
- AI tools go from “occasionally helpful” to “holy-cow-this-is-insane” because they finally have the context they need.
I’ve watched teams go from chronic crunch mode to shipping with smiles once the leadership started treating task-writing as actual design work (because that’s exactly what it is).
How to Write Tasks Engineers Will Love You For (2025 Edition)
Here’s the checklist that top-performing teams are using right now. Steal it, paste it into Notion/Linear/Jira, and enforce it like your runway depends on it (because it does).
- Imperative Title (Make It a Command)
Bad: “Notifications”
Good: “Build in-app notification center with read/unread states and deep links” - One-Sentence Problem Statement
“Users miss important updates because there’s no central place to see mentions, approvals, and task assignments.” - Appetite (This Is the Secret Sauce)
“This is a 3-week cycle max” or “Small-batch: 4 days tops.” Forces you to cut scope early instead of mid-sprint. - Key Solution Elements / Fat-Marker Sketch
Bullet points or a quick Figma/Miro sketch. No pixel-perfect designs — just enough to show the shape. - Acceptance Criteria (Definition of Done)
Concrete, testable bullets:- Badge shows unread count on sidebar
- Clicking notification navigates to exact comment/thread
- Supports mentions, approvals, task assignments
- Works offline (queued sync)
- No push notifications (out of scope this cycle)
- Explicit No-Gos & Rabbit Holes
“Do NOT build rich text editor — markdown only”
“Do NOT support custom domains”
“Ignore timezones for v1 — US-only” - Context Links
- Figma file
- Analytics dashboard showing the pain
- Relevant Slack thread or Notion doc
- “Follow the same pattern as the UpdateCompany modal”
- Open Questions / Risks (Optional but Gold)
“Unsure how offline queue interacts with existing sync — let’s discuss in refinement.”
Steal the full template from Basecamp’s Shape Up (free online) or Linear’s issue templates — both are battle-tested and delightful.
Final Note
Writing clear tasks isn’t extra paperwork — it’s the highest-leverage thing you can do as a leader in 2025.
It’s the difference between a team that’s constantly firefighting and a team that ships meaningful, high-quality work with energy left over for the next big swing.
Start small: pick your next three tasks, run them through the checklist, and watch what happens.
Your engineers will feel the difference immediately.Your velocity numbers will feel it next sprint.And your future self (the one not waking up at 3 a.m. worrying about the release) will send you a thank-you note.
You’ve got this.
Sources & Further Reading
- “How to Write Developer-Ready Tickets: A Practical Guide for Product Teams” – Arbisoft (Apr 2025) https://arbisoft.com/blogs/how-to-write-developer-ready-tickets-a-practical-guide-for-product-teams
- Standish Group CHAOS Report insights (2024–2025 data summaries) https://opencommons.org/CHAOS_Report_on_IT_Project_Outcomes
- “AI Coding Tools Hallucination Is Out of Control” – Open AI Journal (Jul 2025) https://www.openaijournal.com/ai-coding-tools-hallucination/
- Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters – Ryan Singer / Basecamp (free online book) https://basecamp.com/shapeup
- “Writing Engineering Tasks as a Team Process” – Maxim Gorin (Jul 2025) https://maxim-gorin.medium.com/writing-engineering-tasks-as-a-team-process-afccc9767eb4
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