auto-manager

auto-manager is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from dburkart/auto-engineer. It costs 110 tokens per session (3,798 once invoked), scanned A, original, BSD-3-Clause.

An autonomous project-management workflow for turning a broad goal or scoping issue into a planned, merged body of software work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore a backlog and codebase, propose scope, create sub-issues, organize parallel workstreams, and start coding agents for an entire project or epic.
Why use it?
It removes the need to manually discover scope, split an effort into issues, coordinate dependencies, and supervise separate coding tasks.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Good fit Use it to explore a backlog and codebase, propose scope, create sub-issues, organize parallel workstreams, and start coding agents for an entire project or epic.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dburkart/auto-engineer/auto-manager
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 dburkart/auto-engineer --skill auto-manager
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dburkart/auto-engineer

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 auto-manager

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dburkart/auto-engineer/auto-manager/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dburkart/auto-engineer/auto-manager)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dburkart/auto-engineer/auto-manager"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dburkart/auto-engineer/auto-manager/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 auto-manager

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dburkart/auto-engineer/auto-manager"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dburkart/auto-engineer/auto-manager.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 110 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,798 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 $0.00110 $0.03798
Opus 5.5 $0.00044 $0.01519
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00022 $0.00760
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00380

Measured 1mo ago against content hash ea8001dd0acd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

auto-manager 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.

templates/skills/auto-manager/SKILL.md · 232 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 232 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

auto-manager

Takes either a specific scoping issue or a fuzzy topic, and drives it through to a merged epic without requiring the user to manually file each sub-issue, plan workstreams, or coordinate subagents. The skill owns five phases:

  1. Discover (fuzzy input only) — explore the open backlog + codebase to gather candidate issues and surface gaps; present a scope proposal for the user to approve before doing anything destructive.
  2. Scope — read the spec / approved scope, inspect the codebase, file well-scoped sub-issues.
  3. Refine — iterate with the user on the filed plan (rescope, fold, drop).
  4. Plan — partition issues into independent workstreams with a dependency graph.
  5. Orchestrate — spawn /auto-engineer subagents in parallel (worktree-isolated, background) and respawn as predecessors land.

Read the tracker playbook first: {{PLAYBOOK_TRACKER}}. All tracker operations in this skill — listing the backlog, fetching/editing/commenting/closing issues, filing new ones — go through its recipes. Do not invoke gh issue ... or mcp__github__*_issue directly.

{{#if PLAYBOOK_SDLC}}Then read these shared playbooks:

  • {{PLAYBOOK_SDLC}}
  • {{PLAYBOOK_PRIORITIZATION}}
  • {{PLAYBOOK_PR_REVIEW}} {{/if}}

Also read the sibling skills you'll call into:

  • .claude/skills/file-issue/SKILL.md — used in phase 1 for every sub-issue filed.
  • .claude/skills/auto-engineer/SKILL.md — hard dependency; phase 4 is meaningless without it.

Hard requirements

  • /auto-engineer must exist in this project. If not, stop and tell the user.
  • {{PLAYBOOK_TRACKER}} must exist. Without it this skill has no way to read or mutate the backlog.
  • The repo must have gh, a code-review gate (CODEOWNERS + reviewers, a review bot, or equivalent), and CI wired up — auto-engineer's loop assumes these. (Note: gh is required for PR/CI operations regardless of tracker; for GitHub-tracker projects it's also used by the tracker playbook's recipes.)

When to invoke

Read the full file on GitHub · 232 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. 1mo ago First seen · 232 lines · 110 tokens per session scan A ea8001dd0acd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

auto-manager is a skill published in the GitHub repository dburkart/auto-engineer (5 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed BSD-3-Clause. It adds 110 tokens to every session and 3,798 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.