The Five Stages That Make AI Task Automation Work (Part 2)

In Part 1, I walked through the architecture: JIRA webhooks → GitHub → Cursor agent. Today I'm covering the process — the five stages that turn a rough ticket into a merged PR without losing human oversight. Most teams try "ticket → AI → code" and it breaks. The agent misunderstands the requirement, or devs lose trust after one bad PR. The fix isn't better prompts — it's structured handoffs. The Five Transitions We built this with two agent stages and three human review gates. Agents never jump from a vague ticket straight to implementation. 1. Refinement (human) A team member (BA, PO, or dev) writes the initial ticket. It can be rough: "Add error handling for the payment webhook timeout case." Status: Refinement. Next step: agent formatting. 2. Agent: Refine A Cursor agent reads the ticket and generates: Acceptance criteria (pass/fail conditions) Definition of Done (checklist: tests, docs, deploy) How to test (manual or automated outline) Implementation plan (file-by-file breakdown, l