Dependencies and readiness

Each story lists the stories it waits on in depends_on. CodeSense resolves those ids across the whole team, and uses them to tell you which stories are ready to start and which are still blocked.

depends_on

In markdown, depends_on is a YAML list of story_ids:

story_id: LL-233
depends_on: [LL-214, LL-231]

In an HTML story it’s a comma-separated meta tag: <meta name="cs:depends-on" content="LL-209, LL-231">.

The ids are bare story_ids, resolved through one index that covers every story in your workspace. So:

• Links can cross epics. LL-236 in checkout-v2 can depend on LL-262 in invoicing-exports.
• Moving a file doesn’t break links. The id stays the same wherever the file lives.
• An id used by two stories doesn’t resolve until you make it unique.

A story whose dependency doesn’t resolve, or isn’t done yet, isn’t ready.

Ready in the left nav

The left nav marks a story ready when its status is a not-started one (such as Todo) and every story in its depends_on is done. Hover the row:

• a ready story says “Ready — all dependencies met”
• a story that isn’t ready names what it’s blocked by, for example LL-214 (review), or (unresolved) for an id that doesn’t match any story

Readiness is worked out against the whole team’s stories, so a dependency in another epic counts even when you’ve drilled into one folder.

Epic progress

Each epic row in the left nav counts its done stories out of the total, including its sub-epics. The counts come from the stories’ status fields, so they’re always as current as the files.

Query dependencies

To list dependencies, query them. The depends key in a csquery block lists the stories that depend on one story. An agent can answer “what blocks LL-233?” with the query_context MCP tool. See Query your context.

Coming

Dependencies across repos, such as an api story blocking a web story, confirmed end to end in readiness. Dependencies aren’t filtered by repo, but that path isn’t covered by a test yet.

Unlocks with a tested cross-repo dependency in the sample project.