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

Use it to show backlog overviews or filter issues by status, priority, or blocked state.

It turns scattered issue information into a focused view of what the team is working on and what comes next.

backlog — Skill for Claude Code by Abilityai/abilities

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.

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.

Or install agent-dev, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 47 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/abilityai/abilities/backlog/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/abilityai/abilities/backlog)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/abilityai/abilities/backlog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/abilityai/abilities/backlog/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/abilityai/abilities/backlog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/abilityai/abilities/backlog.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

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. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00018	$0.01103
Opus 5.5	$0.00007	$0.00441
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00004	$0.00221
Haiku 4.5	$0.00002	$0.00110

Measured 1mo ago against content hash f1bd38fb67ad, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, 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 1mo 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.

1mo 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 (12 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 18 tokens to every session and 1,103 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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