When just starting a project, you have nothing---no UI, no data layer, nothing in between. Thus, a single story like "users should be able to view their foos" will entail a lot of work. Once you have that story, one like "users should be able to edit their foos" is more realistic, but that first story will involve setting up a UI layer, a presentation logic layer, a domain logic layer, and a data access layer.
This doesn't fit with my concept of "tasks": to me, I'd rather have something like the following "tasks":
Show dummy data for a user's foos in HTML, derived from JavaScript objects.
Set up a presentation logic layer, and connect the JavaScript objects to it.
Set up a domain logic layer, and connect the presentation logic layer to it.
Set up a data access layer, and connection the domain logic layer to it.
Do all of these fall under the single "story" above? If so, I feel like stories are not a terribly useful framework in the early stages of a project. If so, that's fine---I just want to make sure I'm not missing something, since I'm really trying to learn this agile methodology as best I can.