An automated work cycle that selects one task from a GitHub backlog, carries it out, closes it, and then ends. A scheduler can start it again later for the next task.

Use it for scheduled or manual work on repositories where tasks are tracked with GitHub issues and labels such as status, priority, and skill area.

It lets an agent make steady progress on one issue at a time without loading the entire backlog into one session.

work-loop — 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 work-loop

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/work-loop/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/abilityai/abilities/work-loop)

Your own site

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

Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,409 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	$0.00031	$0.01409
Opus 5.5	$0.00012	$0.00564
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00006	$0.00282
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00141

Measured 1mo ago against content hash ae01d3ff21e1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

work-loop 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/work-loop/SKILL.md · 165 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 165 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Work Loop

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. work-loop vX.Y — recent: <summary>. Then proceed.

Autonomous skill that picks one issue from the backlog, executes it, and exits. The scheduler re-invokes it for the next issue — one issue per context window.

Purpose

Run on a schedule (or manually) to autonomously advance the agent's task backlog. Each invocation handles exactly one issue, keeping context focused and noise-free. The cron handles iteration; this skill handles execution.

State Dependencies

Source	Location	Read	Write	Description
GitHub Issues	Current repo	Yes	Yes	Task backlog
GitHub Labels	status:, priority:, skill:*	Yes	Yes	Track status and route by skill
Agent Skills	.claude/skills/	Yes	No	Available capabilities
CLAUDE.md	./CLAUDE.md	Yes	No	Agent identity and guidelines

Prerequisites

gh CLI authenticated
Repository has required labels (status:todo, status:in-progress, priority:*)
Agent has skills to handle the types of issues in backlog

Process

Step 1: Check for In-Progress Work

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

If an issue is in-progress:

This is the current task
Parse the issue body for requirements
Continue working on it (skip to Step 3)

If no in-progress work, proceed to Step 2.

Step 2: Pick Next Task

Find highest priority todo:

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

# Then P1
gh issue list --label "priority:p1" --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,body,labels --limit 1

# Then P2
gh issue list --label "priority:p2" --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,body,labels --limit 1

# Then any todo
gh issue list --label "status:todo" --state open --json number,title,body,labels --limit 1

Read the full file on GitHub · 165 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 · 165 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A ae01d3ff21e1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

work-loop is a skill published in the GitHub repository Abilityai/abilities (12 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 1,409 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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