witan-task

An interactive task manager for a dependency-aware work graph. It organises tasks, larger epics, dependencies, projects, and links to code symbols.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find ready work, claim tasks, create tasks and sub-issues, connect blockers, and close completed tasks.
Why use it?
It prevents two sessions from unknowingly working on the same task by requiring active work to be claimed.

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/mitodl/agent-kit/witan-task
Any agent
npx skills add mitodl/agent-kit --skill witan-task
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mitodl/agent-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 152 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,178 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 $0.00152 $0.02178
Opus 5 $0.00076 $0.01089
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00436
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00218

Measured 2d ago against content hash 79c7f5bb7d97, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

witan-task 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.

mcp/servers/witan/witan/skills/witan-task/SKILL.md · 194 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 194 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Task Manager

Interactive entry point for the dependency-aware task tracker. Tasks live in the same graph as workflow projects and memory, so they can roll up to a project (project_slug), nest under an epic (parent), block one another (blocked_by), and reference code-graph symbols (symbol_refs).

The repo key is auto-detected from .git/config (the canonical HTTPS URI) — you rarely pass repo explicitly.

Claim before you work it

Any task you actually start gets claimed first — task_claim(slug="tk-...") before the first edit, every time. This is not limited to tasks you reached through this skill. It applies just as much to one you picked off the ready list in your session's injected context, one named in a witan project run prompt, or one a human mentioned by slug.

The claim is the only signal that anybody is on it. in_progress with a live lease is what makes task_ready hide it from the next session and what makes task_claim refuse a second holder — an unclaimed task being actively worked looks exactly like one nobody has touched. Two sessions have already written the same fix for the same task on the same day, each unaware of the other, because neither claimed it first.

So:

  • Claim it when you decide to work it, not when you finish. A claim after the fact records history; it prevents nothing.
  • Take the refusal seriously. {"claimed": false, "held_by": ...} means someone is on it. Pick another task — do not force past a live lease without a reason you can state.
  • Pass session_id, not assignee. task_claim(slug=..., session_id=...) — your $CLAUDE_SESSION_ID on Claude Code, any stable per-run id elsewhere. It qualifies the holder as <you>#<session> so your own parallel sessions are told apart; without it they all claim under one name, the contention check cannot separate them, and the second session silently renews the first's lease and is told it claimed. A deployed witan cannot infer the id (a pod has no $CLAUDE_SESSION_ID, and MCP carries no session state), so an agent talking to it directly has to send it — the CLI's proxy does this for you, an MCP client does not. A success with "qualified": false and a "warning" is the server telling you this happened. Do not put the session id in assignee: that replaces the holder outright, so the claim records a session and no person. Reserve assignee for a genuinely different worker identity (a CI job, a named runner).
  • Release what you drop. task_release(slug=...) if you claim something and then move on, so it returns to ready work instead of ageing out.
  • Claim as you go, not in bulk. When handed a list, claim each task as you reach it. Claiming all of them up front holds leases on work you may never start, which is the same lie in the other direction.

Read the full file on GitHub · 194 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 · 194 lines · 152 tokens per session scan A 79c7f5bb7d97

Subscribe to this mod's changes

witan-task is a skill published in the GitHub repository mitodl/agent-kit (2 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed BSD-3-Clause. It adds 152 tokens to every session and 2,178 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.

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