A task-picking workflow for taking the next ready issue from Linear, GitHub Issues, or Notion. A git worktree is a separate working directory for safely developing a branch.

Use it to find an available task, mark it in progress, create a branch and worktree, and load relevant project notes.

It prevents work based on stale local planning files and checks that task dependencies are complete before coding.

pickup-task — Skill by firatcand

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/firatcand/forge/pickup-task

Any agent

npx skills add firatcand/forge --skill pickup-task

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/firatcand/forge

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,084 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan C 1 finding. 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00034	$0.02084
Opus 5	$0.00017	$0.01042
Sonnet 5	$0.00007	$0.00417
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00208

Measured 3d ago against content hash cd80d268992f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

pickup-task scanned grade C with 1 finding 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 3d 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.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

running `/wrap-up`. Handle both shapes: `[ -L node_modules ] && rm node_modules || rm -rf node_modules` (run INSIDE the worktree — never against the main checkout).

skills/pickup-task/SKILL.md · 171 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 171 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/pickup-task

Status queries always hit the tracker. plans/phases.yaml is a stale cache. See your project CLAUDE.md §Source of truth.

Args

[phase] — default: current active phase
[type-filter] — optional, filter by owner_type

Steps

Query the tracker — never plans/phases.yaml — for status or dependencies. Use the Tracker interface (mcp__linear-server__list_issues for Linear, gh issue list for GitHub, ntn for Notion) to find active issues in the current cycle that are:
- Status: Todo (or Backlog with no blockers)
- All blocked_by issues are Done — verify via relations.blockedBy (issue prose like Depends on: forge#N is unreliable)
phases.yaml is a local execution snapshot derived from the tracker — every status, dependency, or blocker field in it can be stale. The tracker is authoritative for all execution metadata; see your project CLAUDE.md §Source of truth.
If multiple match, list and ask user to pick. If one, auto-pick.
Set Linear issue status → "In Progress"
Compute branch name: feat/{LINEAR-ID}-{kebab-case-title}
Create the worktree + hydrate gitignored project meta via the CLI verb:
```
forge orchestrate ensure-worktree --task "${LINEAR_ID}" --json
```
The verb (src/cli/orchestrate/ensure-worktree.ts) owns:
- Task-ID sanitization (same rules as src/core/workspace.ts#sanitizeIssueId)
- Repo-root resolution via git rev-parse --git-common-dir so the worktree lands under the main checkout (not a sibling worktree, which would nest)
- git worktree add at .forge/worktrees/<sanitized-id>/
- .forge/worktree-task.json marker (binds worktree to task ID for worktree-guard preflight in /implement, /ship, /qa)
- Hydration of spec/*.md, plans/, docs/learnings/, CLAUDE.md, CRITICAL.md, and .forge/settings.yaml from the main checkout — these are gitignored as a dogfooding rule but workers need them at runtime
- Idempotence: if the worktree already exists with a matching marker, no-op exit 0; conflicting marker exits 1 with WORKTREE_CONFLICT

Read the full file on GitHub · 171 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.

3d ago First seen · 171 lines · 34 tokens per session scan C cd80d268992f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pickup-task is a skill published in the GitHub repository firatcand/forge (13 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 2,084 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Git and workflow Project management agentic-coding ai-coding-agent claude-code codex compound-engineering spec-driven-development

pickup-task

Getting it into your agent

What it costs to keep this loaded

Grade C, and why

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

How it starts

/pickup-task

Args

Steps

What this file has done since we first saw it

Other skills, from other repositories

ospec-goal

ospec

ospec-change

prospec-verify

prospec-archive

prospec-knowledge-generate