What is working-on-an-issue?

A skill for implementing a GitHub issue through a complete hands-off workflow, from understanding and planning the work to verification and a pull request. A GitHub issue is a tracked request for a bug fix, change, or feature.

Use it when asked to work on an issue or issue URL, including repository preparation, implementation, testing, recording assumptions, and opening the resulting pull request.

It gives the work a documented scope, verification plan, implementation plan, and review point instead of leaving decisions scattered during development.

working-on-an-issue — Skill for Claude Code by britt

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 britt/agent-skills --skill working-on-an-issue

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/britt/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills.

Its marketplace also offers this one on its own, as the plugin working-on-an-issue — /plugin install working-on-an-issue after adding the marketplace above.

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/britt/agent-skills/working-on-an-issue/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/britt/agent-skills/working-on-an-issue)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/britt/agent-skills/working-on-an-issue"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/britt/agent-skills/working-on-an-issue/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/britt/agent-skills/working-on-an-issue"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/britt/agent-skills/working-on-an-issue.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,658 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	$0.00068	$0.01658
Opus 5	$0.00034	$0.00829
Sonnet 5	$0.00014	$0.00332
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00166

Measured 10d ago against content hash 5c2e2021bcab, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

working-on-an-issue 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 10d 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/working-on-an-issue/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Working on an Issue

Announce at start: "I'm using the working-on-an-issue skill to implement this GitHub issue."

Overview

A hands-off workflow for implementing GitHub issues. There are no approval gates before the pull request: the developer reviews finished work on the PR, so every judgment call you make must be recorded where they will see it.

Core principle: Understand → Update project status → Recon → Plan verification → Plan implementation → Implement → Verify → PR

Create TodoWrite todos for the pre-flight checklist and each numbered step below.

When to Use

Developer asks to work on or implement a GitHub issue
Developer provides an issue URL or number

When NOT to Use

Issue is epic-sized or bundles multiple independent changes → run issue-decomposition first
Issue is too vague to restate as testable acceptance criteria → run requirement-elicitation, or comment on the issue with your questions, and stop
Triaging or labeling incoming issues → triage-new-issues

Pre-flight Checklist

Issue URL or number obtained
Repository cloned; work branch created: issue-<number>-<short-slug>
CLAUDE.md exists (or run setting-up-a-project first)

The Process

1. Read the Whole Issue

Get the issue and its comments: gh issue view <number> --comments (or GitHub MCP tools, or ask for pasted content). Comments often supersede the body — the latest clarification wins. Check for linked or duplicate PRs already addressing it.

Sizing check: restate the issue as 1–5 testable acceptance criteria. If you can't, take the off-ramp in When NOT to Use instead of proceeding.

Do not invent requirements. Where the issue is ambiguous, choose the narrowest interpretation that satisfies the text and record it as an assumption — assumptions go in the plan file and the PR description, never unstated.

Assumptions resolve ambiguity in how, never reduce what the issue asks for. Dropping a named request ("deferred the tour") is not an assumption — it's a scope cut, and scope cuts go through issue-decomposition, not the assumptions list. Manufacturing acceptance criteria the issue never stated to pass the sizing check is the same violation.

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 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.

10d ago First seen · 134 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 5c2e2021bcab

Subscribe to this mod's changes

working-on-an-issue is a skill published in the GitHub repository britt/agent-skills (5 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,658 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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