plan-backlog

A skill that retrieves open GitHub Issues and ranks them with RICE: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. It writes the resulting action plan to a project state file and does not modify the issues.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to fetch, score, and prioritise work in a GitHub repository, provided the GitHub CLI and a GitHub remote are available.
Why use it?
It turns an unprioritised issue list into an ordered backlog without requiring manual scoring.

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/mataeil/ooda-loop/plan-backlog
Any agent
npx skills add mataeil/OODA-loop --skill plan-backlog
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mataeil/OODA-loop

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,998 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 $0.00040 $0.01998
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00999
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00400
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00200

Measured 2d ago against content hash ac2739bffa0c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

plan-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 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.

skills/plan-backlog/SKILL.md · 180 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

plan-backlog: GitHub Issues RICE Scorer

Fetches open GitHub Issues, scores each with RICE (Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort), and outputs a ranked priority table. READ-ONLY — writes only to agent/state/backlog.json.


Step 0: Safety

HALT check — if config.safety.halt_file exists: print [HALT] plan-backlog stopped. Reason: {content} and exit.

gh check — run gh --version. If unavailable:

gh CLI not available. Skipping plan-backlog.
Install: https://cli.github.com  |  Auth: gh auth login

Exit cleanly (not an error).


Step 1: Load Issues

Remote check — before fetching issues, verify a GitHub remote exists:

git remote -v 2>/dev/null | grep -qE 'github\.com[:/]'

This checks for any remote pointing to GitHub (regardless of remote name — origin, upstream, etc.) and rejects non-GitHub remotes (GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.) that would cause gh to fail with a confusing error.

If no GitHub remote is found:

  • Print [plan-backlog] No GitHub remote configured. Backlog scoring requires a GitHub repository with issues. Skipping.
  • Write state file with "status": "no_remote" (preserve and increment run_count if state already exists)
  • Exit 0 — do NOT crash or show raw git errors

EVERY early-exit state write (no_remote, no_issues, fetch/parse error) MUST also include "actionable_items": 0, "top_rice_score": 0.0 — evolve's 4-B chain trigger evaluates those fields (actionable_items >= 1 AND top_rice_score >= 50); omitting them leaves the condition undecidable instead of cleanly false.

gh issue list --state open --json number,title,labels,body,createdAt,assignees --limit 100

On command error → Could not fetch issues. Is this a GitHub repository? Skipping. — exit 0. On malformed JSON (parse error) → treat identically to command error: log Could not parse gh output. Skipping. — exit 0. On empty array → write state with status: "no_issues", print No open issues to score. — exit 0.

Read the full file on GitHub · 180 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 · 180 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A ac2739bffa0c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

plan-backlog is a skill published in the GitHub repository mataeil/OODA-loop (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 1,998 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.