build-item

A workflow for taking one DevStride work item—a small unit of planned software work—from selection through coding, review, merging, and completion.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to build the next planned story or defect, or to deliver a one-off item through a pull request and merge.
Why use it?
It organizes the delivery steps so work moves through the project process consistently, including code review and dependency handling.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/devstride/claude-plugin/build-item
Any agent
npx skills add devstride/claude-plugin --skill build-item
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/devstride/claude-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 8,889 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00077 $0.08889
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.04444
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.01778
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00889

Measured yesterday against content hash 7bd887205e83, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

build-item 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 yesterday.

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/build-item/SKILL.md · 498 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 498 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Human output. Read ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/build-item/references/plain-language-output.md once per top-level run; composed skills reuse it. Apply it to every message.

Orchestrate ONE DevStride one-day leaf item (this org's Story or Defect types) end-to-end: select → In Progress → branch → build → review → PR → merge → completion ritual → sync → next. This is the ORCHESTRATOR. It composes the other delivery skills and owns ONLY the DevStride glue (selection, lane transitions, the completion ritual). Invoke them by name; do not re-spell what they do.

Argument — an item number, or next/empty for the next unblocked item. It may also SCOPE selection to one plan by naming its ROOT (a parent item at any grouping level of the org's hierarchy, e.g. this org's Module/Capability/Epic): next under I20100, or I20100 alone, meaning "the next unblocked item under this root" — a bare root is a SCOPE, never a story to build, so resolve it as the plan root and then select within it. A specific item that is not part of a sequenced plan is auto-detected as a one-off: $ARGUMENTS

Ground rules

  • Full-auto through merge. Run the whole loop without pausing between steps. PAUSE only at a genuine fork: work gated on a human/infra decision that is the user's (AWS/DNS/SES/Stripe/ secrets/provisioning), an ambiguous or unverifiable review finding, or a destructive / outward-facing action. Record every deferral explicitly rather than silently skipping it.
  • The DevStride MCP targets PRODUCTION. Lane moves and the completion ritual are real, user-visible changes to live items. The MCP cannot exercise branch code.
  • Config: .claude/ds-config.json — re-read it EVERY iteration; it wins over any literal here.
  • Skill freshness. The on-disk skills and config are the only source of truth, and they evolve mid-initiative. Skill text you remember from an earlier iteration — especially through a context compaction — is EXPIRED. Re-invoke each composed skill at the iteration that needs it (the observed cost of not doing so: references/progress-table.md).
  • The plan is a HYPOTHESIS. Validate the story's spec against the ACTUAL codebase before building — paths move, dependencies ship early, stated approaches turn out wrong. Correct the item's description rather than faithfully building the wrong thing, and keep it current as the work firms up, not only at the end. The item is the durable source of truth; the PR is not.

Read the full file on GitHub · 498 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. yesterday First seen · 498 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A 7bd887205e83

Subscribe to this mod's changes

build-item is a skill published in the GitHub repository devstride/claude-plugin (2 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 8,889 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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