A skill that selects the highest-priority unfinished GitHub issue and marks it as in progress. GitHub Issues are project tasks tracked inside a repository.

Use it to claim the next task from a labelled GitHub backlog, or to claim a specific open issue by number.

It removes the need to inspect the backlog and update the issue status manually. It also checks whether another task is already being worked on.

claim — 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 claim

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/claim/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/abilityai/abilities/claim)

Your own site

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

Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 891 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	$0.00020	$0.00891
Opus 5.5	$0.00008	$0.00356
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00004	$0.00178
Haiku 4.5	$0.00002	$0.00089

Measured 1mo ago against content hash a50ef5b28219, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

claim 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/claim/SKILL.md · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Claim

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. claim vX.Y — recent: <summary>. Then proceed.

Select the next issue from the GitHub Issues backlog and mark it as in-progress.

State Dependencies

Source	Location	Read	Write	Description
GitHub Issues	Current repo	Yes	Yes	Task backlog
GitHub Labels	status:, priority:, skill:*	Yes	Yes	Update status

Prerequisites

gh CLI installed and authenticated (gh auth status)
Repository has required labels (run /backlog to check/create)

Process

Step 1: Check Current Work

gh issue list --label "status:in-progress" --state open --json number,title --limit 1

If an issue is already in-progress, report it and ask:

Continue that work (show full issue)
Park it and claim something new
Cancel

Step 2: Select Issue

If specific issue number provided ($ARGUMENTS):

gh issue view $ARGUMENTS --json number,title,body,labels,state

Verify it exists and is open.

If no argument — find highest priority todo:

# Try P0 first
gh issue list --label "priority:p0" --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,body,labels --limit 1

# If none, try P1
gh issue list --label "priority:p1" --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,body,labels --limit 1

# If none, try P2
gh issue list --label "priority:p2" --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,body,labels --limit 1

# If none, try any status:todo
gh issue list --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,body,labels --limit 1

Step 3: Move to In-Progress

gh issue edit $ISSUE_NUMBER --remove-label "status:todo" --add-label "status:in-progress"
gh issue comment $ISSUE_NUMBER --body "Claimed — starting work."

Step 4: Present Issue

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 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 · 117 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A a50ef5b28219

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claim is a skill published in the GitHub repository Abilityai/abilities (12 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 891 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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