groom-backlog

groom-backlog is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bostonaholic/team. It costs 47 tokens per session (793 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for reviewing and organizing a project's backlog, meaning the list of planned work in an issue tracker. It checks proposed changes against the code and tracker before ranking them.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect an entire board, find gaps, verify issue claims, rank candidates, and prepare evidence-based backlog updates.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork when deciding which issues are real, important, outdated, or ready to close. It pauses for approval before making changes to the shared backlog.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: argument-hint in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the team plugin — 92 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to inspect an entire board, find gaps, verify issue claims, rank candidates, and prepare evidence-based backlog updates.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bostonaholic/team/groom-backlog
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 bostonaholic/team --skill groom-backlog
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bostonaholic/team

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install team, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 92 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks.

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.

agentmods badge for groom-backlog

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/groom-backlog/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/groom-backlog)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/groom-backlog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/groom-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.

agentmods 80×15 button for groom-backlog

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/groom-backlog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/groom-backlog.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 793 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00047 $0.00793
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00396
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00159
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00079

Measured 4d ago against content hash f6d104917e8a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

groom-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 4d 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.

skills/groom-backlog/SKILL.md · 50 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

groom-backlog — plan, ask, wait, then execute

Grooming mutates shared state that a whole team reads. Placement, dates, and ticket rewrites are judgment calls with no mechanical ground truth. A wrong one stays invisible until someone acts on a board that now lies. So this skill plans, asks the consequential questions, and waits. It acts only on approval. That is the shape pr-open-comments takes for an item below its auto-apply bar. That checkpoint is the ethos applied, not a hole in it. The pipeline's autonomous middle earns its autonomy from mechanical gates. A grooming judgment has none, so the user's answer stays this skill's one gate until a loop-driven controller replaces it.

The shape is principle-plan-present-wait: plan the mutations to a file, present each consequential choice with one recommendation, and execute only the answered subset.

Procedure references

Read each reference completely when reaching that stage. Follow them in order; later stages depend on state and gates established earlier.

  1. Vocabulary
  2. Input
  3. The board-level pass
  4. Step 1 — Load once, in bulk
  5. Step 2 — Compute the gap inventory, do not eyeball it
  6. Step 3 — Verify claims against the code
  7. Step 4 — Rank the verified candidates
  8. Step 5 — Cluster by outcome, not by component
  9. Step 6 — Find the dependencies, then propose the links
  10. Step 7 — Write the plan to a file
  11. Step 8 — Present the consequential choices and wait
  12. Step 9 — Execute in dependency order
  13. Step 10 — Verify by re-querying, never by memory
  14. Step 11 — Report, including what you did not change
  15. The promotion standard
  16. Tracker recipes
  17. Hard rules

Read the full file on GitHub · 50 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. 4d ago Changed · -795 lines · -178 tokens per session f6d104917e8a
  2. 6d ago Changed · +17 lines 617b25b6abad
  3. 9d ago First seen · 828 lines · 225 tokens per session scan A 04ab4aa70b21

Subscribe to this mod's changes

groom-backlog is a skill published in the GitHub repository bostonaholic/team (11 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 793 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.