prioritize

A guide for ranking backlog items with RICE, a planning method that weighs how many people a change affects, its expected impact, confidence, and effort.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to score and rank feature requests, bugs, issues, and pull requests, then prepare a prioritized backlog.
Why use it?
It turns a long or unclear task list into an ordered set of work for sprint planning.

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/drn/dots/prioritize
Any agent
npx skills add drn/dots --skill prioritize
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/drn/dots

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 24 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 994 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 $0.00024 $0.00994
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00497
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00199
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00099

Measured 2d ago against content hash 43c793a725bf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prioritize 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 2d 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.

agents/skills/prioritize/SKILL.md · 104 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 104 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Backlog Prioritization

Score and rank a list of work items using the RICE framework, then produce a prioritized backlog ready for sprint planning.

Arguments

  • $ARGUMENTS - Required: list of items to prioritize, OR a path to a file containing them, OR "backlog" to pull from git issues/PRs

If no arguments provided, ask the user what items to prioritize.

Context

  • Repo: !git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null | grep -oE '[^/]+$' | head -1
  • Open issues: !gh issue list --limit 20 --state open 2>/dev/null | head -20
  • Open PRs: !gh pr list --limit 10 --state open 2>/dev/null | head -10

Instructions

Step 1: Gather Items

Parse the input into a list of discrete work items. Each item needs:

  • Title: short description
  • Source: where it came from (user input, issue #, PR #, etc.)

If $ARGUMENTS is "backlog", pull from open GitHub issues and PRs.

If fewer than 3 items, ask the user if they want to add more -- RICE works best with 5+ items to compare.

Step 2: Score Each Item (RICE)

For each item, estimate:

Factor Scale How to Estimate
Reach Number of users/devs affected per quarter Ask: who benefits? How many?
Impact 0.25 (minimal), 0.5 (low), 1 (medium), 2 (high), 3 (massive) Ask: how much does this move the needle?
Confidence 50%, 80%, or 100% How certain are these estimates? Use 80% as default.
Effort Person-days (0.5 = half day, 1 = one day, etc.) How long to implement, test, and ship?

RICE Score = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort

When estimating, be conservative:

  • Default Confidence to 80% unless there's strong evidence either way
  • Round Effort UP (optimistic estimates are the #1 cause of missed deadlines)
  • If you can't estimate Reach, ask the user -- don't guess

Step 3: Classify (MoSCoW)

After scoring, classify each item:

  • Must -- blocking other work or critical for users. Non-negotiable.
  • Should -- high value, should be in this sprint if capacity allows.
  • Could -- nice to have. Only if there's leftover capacity.
  • Won't -- explicitly out of scope. Saying "won't" prevents scope creep.

Read the full file on GitHub · 104 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. 2d ago First seen · 104 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 43c793a725bf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prioritize is a skill published in the GitHub repository drn/dots (23 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 994 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

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