triage

A backlog-review guide for Linear, a tool for managing software issues and projects. It analyses outdated tickets, unresolved dependencies, missing owners, and priorities that do not fit an issue's condition.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to list and filter Linear backlog issues, inspect team dependencies, identify stale or blocked tickets, and decide whether to assign, escalate, update, or close them.
Why use it?
It helps teams find work that has been forgotten, blocked, left without an owner, or marked more urgently than its dependencies allow.

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/joa23/linear-cli/triage
Any agent
npx skills add joa23/linear-cli --skill triage
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/joa23/linear-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 676 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 $0.00058 $0.00676
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00338
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00135
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00068

Measured 2d ago against content hash b0fab3e22748, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

triage 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.

.claude/skills/triage/SKILL.md · 105 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 105 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Triage Skill - Backlog Analysis

Process

1. Setup

linear init  # if .linear.yaml doesn't exist

2. Fetch the backlog

linear issues list --state Backlog --format full --limit 100

Verify: confirm issues are returned before proceeding. If empty, check team context with linear init.

3. Analyze dependencies

linear deps --team ENG

4. Filter by priority and labels

# Urgent (P1)
linear issues list --state Backlog --priority 1 --format full

# High priority (P2)
linear issues list --state Backlog --priority 2 --format full

# Customer issues
linear issues list --labels customer --format full

# Bugs in backlog
linear issues list --state Backlog --labels bug --format full

# Combined filters
linear issues list --state Backlog --priority 1 --labels customer --format full

5. Identify issues

Flag issues matching these patterns:

Pattern Criteria Action
Stale No updates 30+ days Ping assignee or close
Very stale No updates 60+ days Close with comment
Blocked Dependencies unresolved Escalate blocker
Orphaned No assignee + no activity Assign or close
Priority mismatch P1/P2 but blocked Escalate the blocker first

Verify: cross-check flagged issues against dependency graph from step 3. Blocked issues with completed blockers should be unblocked immediately:

linear issues update ENG-123 --priority 2
linear issues comment ENG-123 --body "Triaged: Needs unblocking before sprint"

6. Generate report

Use this output format:

BACKLOG TRIAGE: Team ENG
════════════════════════════════════════

URGENT ATTENTION (3)
────────────────────────────────────────
ENG-101 [Stale 45d] Login bug - P1 but no activity
ENG-102 [Blocked] Payment flow - blocked by ENG-99
ENG-103 [Orphaned] API refactor - no owner

RECOMMENDED ACTIONS
────────────────────────────────────────
1. Unblock ENG-102: Complete ENG-99 or remove dependency
2. Assign ENG-103: Needs owner or close if abandoned
3. Update ENG-101: Stale P1 needs attention

HEALTH SUMMARY
────────────────────────────────────────
Total issues: 45
Blocked: 8 (17%)
Stale: 12 (26%)
Healthy: 25 (55%)

Read the full file on GitHub · 105 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 2d ago First seen · 105 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A b0fab3e22748

Subscribe to this mod's changes

triage is a skill published in the GitHub repository joa23/linear-cli (141 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 676 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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