Walk into refinementwith a ready backlog
A backlog is half-finished thoughts: one-line titles, missing criteria, duplicates nobody caught. Khint upgrades each item to your Definition of Ready with a reusable AI action, keeps the context with Memory, and pushes the result back to Jira from the same keyboard shortcut.
Grooming is a meeting
you pay for twice
Once when the team sits in the room squinting at a ticket that just says “export is broken”, and again when that same under-specified item stalls mid-sprint. The fix is boring prep: read each candidate, rewrite it so anyone can pick it up, add the acceptance criteria, flag what is missing, and update the tracker. Khint compresses that prep with its three pillars (Agents, Capture, and Memory) wired together behind one palette, so refinement happens where the backlog already lives.
One grooming pass, raw to ready
Working a stale “Sprint 24” backlog into shape, item by item.
Open a session for the grooming pass
Before you open the backlog, start a Memory session: call it “Sprint 24 refinement”. Every Action you run is logged to it, and Khint keeps a compact running summary. That summary rides along on each AI Action, so as you work down the list the model already knows the product area, the constraints, and the items you have already touched. How Memory works →
Find what is not ready yet
With Atlassian connected, the palette's Jira Active sprint and Searchrows surface the candidates: the one-line tickets, the “fix the export thing” placeholders, the stories with no acceptance criteria. Pull an issue with Pull issue and its text lands in Khint, ready to refine. How integrations work →
Refine the ticket to Definition of Ready
In Agents, save an Action like “Refine to ready”. Don't have a prompt? Type a description and press Generate. Khint drafts one that returns a clear problem statement, value, acceptance criteria, and the open questions that block estimation. Or clone the Backlog Refiner starter pack for a working Action. Select the raw ticket, hit Cmd+Shift+K, run it, and the upgraded version is pasted back in place.
Add criteria and flag the gaps
For any story still missing detail, run a second Action: an acceptance-criteria drafter that returns Given/When/Then and edge cases. Chaining your refine and criteria Actions into one Workflow turns “raw ticket → ready story” into a single keystroke, so the whole grooming pass moves at one item per shortcut. Acceptance criteria, in one action →
Push the result back and move it forward
Use the Jira Add comment row to post the refined criteria onto the issue, then Change status to move it from raw to ready, one issue per run, so each step is deliberate. Prefer a single artifact for the whole ceremony? Confluence Create page publishes your refined batch as one page the team can read before planning.
Why not just paste each ticket into a chatbot?
You can, and for a backlog of thirty items you'll re-paste the product context every chat, restate the Definition of Ready you want, and copy each result back into the tracker by hand. Khint removes the round-trips: the refinement Action is saved once and reused on every ticket, Memory carries the grooming context into every prompt automatically, and the Atlassian and Linear integrations push the changes where the team will actually read them. Because Actions only see the text you select, plus the session summary you opted into, your unreleased backlog isn't sitting in a chat history.
Common questions
What does Khint do during backlog refinement?
Refinement is the recurring grind of taking vague, stale tickets and making them ready for a sprint. Khint sits behind a single shortcut (Cmd+Shift+K) so you can refine a ticket without leaving it: select the one-line title and rough notes, run a reusable Action, and get back a clear problem statement, acceptance criteria, and open questions. It works in your tracker, your planning doc, or your browser, wherever the ticket already lives.
Is this different from breaking an epic into stories?
Yes. Epic breakdown is a one-time split of a single big item into new stories. Refinement is the ongoing maintenance of an existing backlog: clarifying half-baked tickets, adding what is missing, flagging duplicates, and re-prioritizing before sprint planning. Khint helps with both, but a refinement Action is tuned to upgrade an existing ticket to your Definition of Ready rather than to decompose. If you do need to split an oversized item, see how Khint handles epic breakdown.
Can Khint pull tickets from Jira and update them?
Once you connect Atlassian with your email, API token, and cloud domain, the palette adds Jira rows: Pull issue brings a ticket's text into Khint, Add comment posts your refined criteria back, and Change status moves it from raw to ready. You file changes one issue per run, so every update is explicit. The active sprint and search rows help you find what still needs grooming.
Do I have to write the refinement prompt myself?
No. In the Action editor, type a one-line description and press Generate. Khint drafts the prompt; press Improve later to refine it in place. Khint also ships a Backlog Refiner starter pack you can browse and clone from the Agents page, so you start from a working refinement Action without writing anything.
Where does my backlog text go?
An Action only ever sees the text you selected, plus the compacted summary of your active Memory session if you opted in. Memory sessions live in a local SQLite database on your Mac and are never synced to Khint's servers. Stop the session and the context is closed. Nothing about your roadmap leaves your device silently.
Try it on your next grooming pass
Free with 10 AI actions and 5 captures per day. No credit card. Save the Action once, refine every ticket after.