backlog-management

A set of rules for keeping a project's product-idea backlog, a prioritized list of possible work, ordered and up to date.

In plain words
What is it for?
It guides adding, reordering, promoting, completing, rejecting, and linking backlog ideas to feature-analysis documents.
Why use it?
It prevents ideas from becoming duplicated, losing their priority, or remaining marked as active after their status changes.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/vepo/issues/backlog-management
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vepo/issues

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 423 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 423 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00423 $0.00423
Opus 5 $0.00211 $0.00211
Sonnet 5 $0.00085 $0.00085
Haiku 4.5 $0.00042 $0.00042

Measured yesterday against content hash 18371f82d297, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

backlog-management scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.cursor/rules/backlog-management.mdc · 42 lines

What it actually says

Backlog management

Canonical backlog: docs/backlog.md.

Always

  • Treat the backlog as an ordered table — column Order (integer, lower = higher priority).
  • When adding, removing, promoting, completing, or deprioritizing ideas, update the table and renumber Order so active (idea / ready) ranks stay contiguous starting at 1.
  • Prefer reordering over long prose lists; keep one row per idea.

When to update

Trigger Action
User asks for ideas / backlog / prioritization Propose rows; write them into docs/backlog.md if accepted
New product idea in chat (not starting analysis yet) Add idea row; assign Order
Starting feature analysis for a backlog idea Status → promoted; link feature/<slug>.md
Feature changelog marked done Matching backlog row → done (or remove from active ranks and renumber)
User rejects an idea Status → wont; renumber remaining
User says “prioritize X” / “move Y up” Reorder Order values; do not invent silent priority changes

Do not

  • Put implementation tasks (T1, T2…) in the backlog — those live in feature/*.md.
  • Duplicate the full feature analysis in the backlog — one-line Why / notes + slug + link.
  • Start phase 5 coding from a backlog row alone — still follow development-process.mdc.

Relation to feature docs

backlog idea → feature analysis (feature/<slug>.md) → … → done
     ↑                      ↓
  Order / Status      Status: promoted + Feature doc link

Promoted work may keep a backlog row for visibility until done.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 42 lines · 423 tokens per session scan A 18371f82d297

Subscribe to this mod's changes

backlog-management is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository vepo/issues (8 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 423 tokens to every session, about $0.0021 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.