start-milestone

start-milestone is a skill for Claude Code from Jamie-BitFlight/claude_skills. It costs 82 tokens per session (832 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for moving a GitHub milestone from planning into active work. It updates issue labels and the status shown in GitHub Projects, after first checking the milestone and its open issues.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to begin a milestone, review the issues it contains, and move those issues from grooming to in-progress.
Why use it?
It avoids changing a release or sprint’s status blindly and keeps related issue tracking in sync.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is uv run .claude/skills/gh/scripts/github_project_setup.py milestone start \.

Good fit Use it to begin a milestone, review the issues it contains, and move those issues from grooming to in-progress.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Jamie-BitFlight/claude_skills
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jamie-bitflight/claude_skills/start-milestone

Made for: Claude Code.

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.

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README.md
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Your own site
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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.

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Your own site · 80×15
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Per session 82 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 832 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00082 $0.00832
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00416
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00166
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00083

Measured 8d ago against content hash 7ef6f171deda, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

start-milestone 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 8d 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.

.claude/skills/start-milestone/SKILL.md · 108 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 108 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

<milestone_number>$ARGUMENTS</milestone_number>

Start Milestone

Transition a milestone from planning to active: bulk-update labels and Project board status.

API references: milestones.md | projects-v2.md

Arguments

<milestone_number/> — milestone number (required).

/start-milestone 3

Workflow

Step 1: Resolve Milestone

Call mcp__plugin_dh_backlog__backlog_list_milestones(state="open").

From the returned list, find the entry where number == <milestone_number/>.

If not found in the open list, call mcp__plugin_dh_backlog__backlog_list_milestones(state="all") and filter again.

If milestone is closed, report and stop.

If open_issues == 0, warn: "No open issues. Add items first with /group-items-to-milestone {number}"

Step 2: List Issues

Call mcp__plugin_dh_backlog__backlog_list_issues(milestone="{title}", state="open").

The response contains a list of issues with number, title, state, and labels fields.

Step 3: Confirm

Start milestone "{title}" — {N} open issues

Issues to transition (status:needs-grooming → status:in-progress):
  #12  SAM: Error Recovery        [priority:p1, status:needs-grooming]
  #8   gitlab-skill: Remove URL   [priority:p1, status:needs-grooming]
  #14  create-backlog-item skill  [priority:p2, status:needs-grooming]

Proceed?

Use AskUserQuestion with Yes / No options. Stop without changes if No.

Step 4: Bulk Label Transition

Use the Python automation script (preferred — avoids per-issue bash loops):

uv run .claude/skills/gh/scripts/github_project_setup.py milestone start \
  --number {number}

Or, to preview changes without applying them:

uv run .claude/skills/gh/scripts/github_project_setup.py milestone start \
  --number {number} --dry-run

The script removes status:needs-grooming and adds status:in-progress to each open issue, creates the label if missing, reports per-issue results, and exits non-zero if any issue fails.

Read the full file on GitHub · 108 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. 8d ago First seen · 108 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A 7ef6f171deda

Subscribe to this mod's changes

start-milestone is a skill published in the GitHub repository Jamie-BitFlight/claude_skills (66 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 832 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 2026-09-03.