dismech: Skill for Claude Code

curate-next

Curate the next N disease curation issues that are assigned solely to the current GitHub user and not yet covered by a PR. Dispatches /curate in parallel — one agent per disease.

When to use

• "Curate my next 3 diseases"
• "/curate-next 5"
• "Take the next available curation assignments off my plate"

Skip when:

• The user names a specific disease — invoke /curate <name> directly instead.
• The user has no open curation assignments — invoke /claim-disease N first to file issues.
• The user wants to claim and curate in one step — that's a /claim-disease then /curate-next chain, not this skill alone.

Inputs

• Required positional argument N: number of diseases to curate in parallel. Must be a positive integer between 1 and 8 inclusive.
• Invoked as /curate-next 3. If N is missing, non-integer, <= 0, or > 8, stop and ask the user to clarify rather than guess. The cap exists because each /curate flow is long-running and parallel sub-agents past 8 saturate the orchestrator's context.

Workflow

1. Validate N. Parse the positional argument. Reject if missing, non-integer, <= 0, or > 8 — ask the user rather than silently capping. Never default to a value the user did not provide.
2. Resolve the current GitHub user: USER=$(gh api user -q .login). Use that login as the assignee filter and never hardcode a username.
3. Fetch open curation issues assigned to the user.

   gh issue list \
     --assignee @me \
     --state open \
     --label curation \
     --json number,title,assignees,body,createdAt \
     --limit 100
   

   The --label curation filter is what restricts to "new disease curation requests" — issues filed by /claim-disease carry the curation,enhancement labels and the title pattern Curate <label> (<MONDO_ID>). If a contributor opens curation issues with a different label, document it in this skill rather than relaxing the filter.
4. Filter to sole-assignee issues. Drop any issue whose assignees array has more than one entry. The user explicitly wants solo work — an issue assigned to both alice and bob is a team task, even if the current user is alice. Do this filter in jq, not by hand:

   jq '[.[] | select((.assignees | length) == 1)]'
   

5. Filter out issues with an existing PR. For each remaining issue number ISSUE_NUM, check the authoritative GitHub linkage on the issue itself:

   # Authoritative: PRs GitHub has linked via closes/fixes/resolves keywords
   # (this is the same data the issue's "Development" sidebar shows)
   gh issue view "${ISSUE_NUM}" --json closedByPullRequestsReferences \
     -q '.closedByPullRequestsReferences | length'
   

   Skip the issue if the count is non-zero. A merged PR usually means the issue should already be closed, but stale links happen — be conservative.