backlog

backlog is a skill for Claude Code from martineserios/thebrana. It costs 30 tokens per session (4,114 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A backlog-management skill for organising work across phases, milestones, and epics. It uses natural-language requests and directs task changes through supported command-line or MCP tools.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan phases, view roadmaps, restructure work, and manage epics and their related tasks.
Why use it?
It provides a structured way to plan roadmaps and navigate larger bodies of work without editing the underlying task file directly.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the brana plugin — 56 skills, 4 commands, 14 agents, 13 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to plan phases, view roadmaps, restructure work, and manage epics…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/martineserios/thebrana/backlog
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.

Any agent
npx skills add martineserios/thebrana --skill backlog
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/martineserios/thebrana

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install brana, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 56 skills, 4 commands, 14 agents, 13 hooks.

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.

agentmods badge for backlog

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/martineserios/thebrana/backlog.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/martineserios/thebrana/backlog)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/martineserios/thebrana/backlog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/martineserios/thebrana/backlog.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,114 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.
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 $0.00030 $0.04114
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.02057
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00823
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00411

Measured 6d ago against content hash 7af90ff0096b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

backlog 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 6d 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.

system/skills/backlog/SKILL.md · 213 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 213 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Backlog

Manage the project backlog — plan, track, and navigate work across phases, milestones, and epics. Natural language is the primary interface; these commands are shortcuts for complex operations.

When to use

When explicitly managing the backlog: planning phases, viewing roadmaps, restructuring work. Daily task interaction happens through natural language guided by the task-convention rule — no skill invocation needed.

CLI Integration — MANDATORY

NEVER read or write tasks.json directly.

Prefer MCP tools (brana server) when available — structured JSON, 65% fewer tokens:

Initiative Model (v3)

Epics are hierarchy nodes, not a field (ADR-065). An epic is a top-level task with type: "epic" whose subject is the epic slug (e.g. "cc-alignment"). A task belongs to an epic through its parent chain — its nearest type: "epic" ancestor (walk helper: ../_shared/epic-ancestor-walk.md).

Retired — flat epic field. The pre-v3 flat epic string field is gone and its set/add write paths are sealed (t-2310): backlog_set(field: "epic") and brana backlog set <id> epic <slug> are hard-rejected with unknown field: epic, and brana backlog add --epic is a warned no-op. Never set or create the field. Epic membership is written by setting parent to an epic node's id.

Mid-migration caveat (t-2698): the ADR-065 backfill (promote old epic slugs to nodes, re-parent tasks) has only run in some projects (e.g. thebrana). In a project whose tasks.json has no type: "epic" nodes yet, first create the epic node (brana backlog add --subject "<slug>" --type epic), then parent tasks to it — or, if restructuring isn't warranted yet, tag tasks epic:<slug> as the interim marker (see below). Never resurrect the flat field.

Lightweight epic tag — epic:<slug>. The namespaced tag epic:<slug> (e.g. epic:cc-alignment) is the sanctioned lightweight epic marker: a memorable grouping label for tasks of any size. Use it (a) as the interim marker in un-migrated projects (caveat above), and (b) as an extra cross-cutting handle anywhere a greppable epic label helps. It reads/writes like any tag — backlog_set(field: "tags", value: "+epic:cc-alignment") / brana backlog set <id> tags +epic:cc-alignment — and filters like any tag: backlog_query(tag: "epic:cc-alignment") / brana backlog query --tag epic:cc-alignment. The namespace prefix keeps it from colliding with ordinary tags. Limits: tags do NOT feed focus, the --epic filters, or branch naming — where epic nodes exist, the parent chain stays authoritative; parent to the node first and add the tag only when the extra label earns its keep.

Read the full file on GitHub · 213 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 6d ago First seen · 213 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A 7af90ff0096b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

backlog is a skill published in the GitHub repository martineserios/thebrana (3 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 4,114 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.