backlog

A skill for viewing the open GitHub Issues backlog, including work in progress, upcoming work, priorities, and blocked items.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to show backlog overviews or filter issues by status, priority, or blocked state.
Why use it?
It turns scattered issue information into a focused view of what the team is working on and what comes next.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/abilityai/abilities/backlog
Any agent
npx skills add Abilityai/abilities --skill backlog
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Abilityai/abilities

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 18 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,103 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
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 $0.00018 $0.01103
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00551
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00221
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00110

Measured 2d ago against content hash f1bd38fb67ad, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

backlog 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 2d ago.

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.

plugins/agent-dev/skills/backlog/SKILL.md · 139 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 139 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Backlog

ℹ️ First, set expectations: before anything else, print one short line with this skill's version and its most recent change — the top entry of metadata.changelog above — e.g. backlog vX.Y — recent: <summary>. Then proceed.

View the agent's task backlog from GitHub Issues.

State Dependencies

Source Location Read Write Description
GitHub Issues Current repo Yes No Task backlog
GitHub Labels status:, priority: Yes No Status and priority

Process

Step 1: Parse Arguments

  • /backlog or /backlog status → Show overview (in-progress + next up)
  • /backlog all → Show all open issues by priority
  • /backlog in-progress → Show only in-progress items
  • /backlog blocked → Show blocked items
  • /backlog p0 or /backlog p1 → Show specific priority

Step 2: Verify GitHub CLI

gh auth status 2>&1 | head -3

If not authenticated, tell user to run ! gh auth login.

Step 3: Check Labels Exist

gh label list --json name --jq '.[].name' | grep -E '^(status:|priority:)' | sort

If missing required labels, offer to create them:

gh label create "status:todo" --color "0E8A16" --description "Ready to work"
gh label create "status:in-progress" --color "FBCA04" --description "Currently working"
gh label create "status:blocked" --color "D93F0B" --description "Waiting on something"
gh label create "status:done" --color "6E5494" --description "Finished"
gh label create "priority:p0" --color "B60205" --description "Do now"
gh label create "priority:p1" --color "D93F0B" --description "Do soon"
gh label create "priority:p2" --color "FBCA04" --description "Do eventually"

Step 4: Query Issues

For overview (default):

# In-progress
gh issue list --label "status:in-progress" --state open --json number,title,labels,assignees,updatedAt

# Next up (P0 todos)
gh issue list --label "priority:p0" --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,labels,assignees

# P1 todos  
gh issue list --label "priority:p1" --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,labels,assignees --limit 5

Read the full file on GitHub · 139 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 139 lines · 18 tokens per session scan A f1bd38fb67ad

Subscribe to this mod's changes

backlog is a skill published in the GitHub repository Abilityai/abilities (11 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 18 tokens to every session and 1,103 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-08-30.

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