create-beads: add an independence heuristic for the epic-vs-single-bead choice

[fkberthold]

Summary

The create-beads skill frames the "epic + child tasks" vs "standalone task" choice by size ("Multi-task features" vs "Small features"), but the decision that actually matters for how the beads get worked is independence, not size. The skill never prompts that question.

Where

skills/create-beads/SKILL.md → ## Structure:

**Multi-task features:** Epic + child tasks
...
**Small features:** Standalone tasks
...

Expected vs actual

When you have 2+ candidate items, the load-bearing question is: are they independent — no shared files, no sequential dependency?

• Independent items belong as sibling tasks under an epic. bd ready then surfaces them all at once, so an executor (human or agent) can pick them up in parallel.
• Coupled items (shared files, or one depends on another's outcome) belong in a single bead with steps — splitting them just manufactures dependency edges you then have to manage.

Today, because the only cue is size, two failure modes are easy to fall into:

1. Filing several independent items as one bead with a bullet-list of subtasks — bd ready never surfaces them as parallelizable, so the parallel-dispatch opportunity is lost at authoring time.
2. Filing coupled items as separate beads — creating dependency edges and blocked-bead churn for work that was really one unit.

Proposed direction

One approach: add a short subsection to ## Structure that makes the independence question explicit at creation time, e.g.:

Epic or one bead? When you have 2+ candidate items, ask if they're independent — no shared files, no sequential dependency:

• Independent → sibling tasks under one epic. bd ready surfaces them in parallel.
• Coupled (shared files, or one needs another's outcome) → a single bead with steps.

Default to one bead when unsure — it's cheaper to split later than to merge two.

Happy to open a PR (I have one drafted) — wording/placement is of course yours to decide.

Context

Surfaced while using beadpowers in a downstream workflow project (loom, public) that adopted exactly this independence heuristic in its own bead-authoring conventions and found the same prompt was missing upstream in create-beads. Tracked downstream as loom-7bn.