shepherd-start

shepherd-start is a skill for Claude Code from mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot. It costs 52 tokens per session (1,173 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A setup and investigation workflow for Bug Shepherd, a system for organizing software-bug triage, the process of examining and prioritizing reported problems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to start an investigation for a Jira, Linear, or GitHub issue, establish the backlog baseline, and prepare a structured session for developers, product managers, or designers.
Why use it?
It prepares the project context before investigating a bug, checks the repository state, and loads the relevant tracker information and past lessons.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the bug-shepherd plugin — 5 skills, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it to start an investigation for a Jira, Linear, or GitHub issue, establish the backlog baseline, and prepare a structured session for developers, product managers, or designers.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot/shepherd-start
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 mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot --skill shepherd-start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install bug-shepherd, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 1 agent.

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 shepherd-start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot/shepherd-start.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot/shepherd-start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot/shepherd-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot/shepherd-start.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,173 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00052 $0.01173
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00587
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00235
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00117

Measured 2d ago against content hash 18400e4cb83a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shepherd-start 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.

plugins/bug-shepherd/skills/shepherd-start/SKILL.md · 153 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 153 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/shepherd-start {TICKET-ID} — Bug Investigation Session

Begin a focused investigation session for a single bug. This command sets up context, loads institutional memory, and prepares a structured investigation plan.

Audience: PMs, designers, or developers. No code knowledge required for investigation; code knowledge only needed if you plan to fix it yourself.

Arguments

  • {TICKET-ID} (required): The bug tracker ID (e.g., PROJ-1234, #456)

Workflow

1. Load Configuration

Read .claude/triage.config.yaml for project settings. If it does not exist, run the first-run setup in /shepherd-sync step 1 to create it from the bundled template, then continue.

2. Pre-Flight Checks

  • If team.git_email is set, verify: git config user.email matches. If not, warn:
    "Git email mismatch. Expected: {git_email}, Got: {actual}."
    "Fix: git config user.email {git_email}"
    
  • Verify clean working directory: git status --porcelain. If dirty:
    "Working directory has uncommitted changes. Commit or stash before starting a new session."
    
  • Check that we're on main/master branch. If not, warn.

3. Auto-Sync Backlog

If .claude/backlog-live.md doesn't exist or is older than 24 hours, run /shepherd-sync first.

4. Pull Full Bug Details

Load the appropriate adapter and fetch complete bug details:

For Jira:

  • Title, description, priority, status, assignee, reporter
  • All comments (chronological)
  • Attachments and screenshots
  • Linked issues
  • Sprint history

For Linear:

  • Title, description, priority, status, assignee
  • Comments and activity
  • Related issues

For GitHub Issues:

  • Title, body, labels, assignees
  • All comments
  • Linked PRs

5. Create Working Branch (if developer session)

Only if the user intends to fix (not just investigate):

git checkout main && git pull origin main
git checkout -b fix/{TICKET-ID}-{slug}

Where {slug} is a kebab-case summary (max 5 words from the title).

6. Load Institutional Memory

Read the full file on GitHub · 153 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 Changed · +2 lines · +13 tokens per session 18400e4cb83a
  2. 8d ago First seen · 151 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A 0b63f365aee1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shepherd-start is a skill published in the GitHub repository mshadmanrahman/pm-pilot (20 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 1,173 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

g-doctor

Read-only health diagnostics for G-Forge projects — 25 checks including hook registration, installed-copy drift, Check 23 plugin-version-lag, Check 24 CLAUDE.md injection-rule compliance, and Check 25 integration-tier guard. Recommends /plugins or /g-update by direction. Never writes.

onlygian/G-Forge · 69 tokens

linear-update

Update Linear issues with debugging findings. Add comments, change status, update labels, set priority. Use after completing investigations.

eveld/claude · 27 tokens

issue-triage

Triage a bug or Jira ticket into ranked root-cause candidates and proposed solution paths. Read-only unless the user opts in to publish. Use when the user says "triage this", "triage [TICKET-KEY]", "what's causing this bug", "help me find the root cause", or invokes /issue-triage.

risadams/ink-and-agency · 75 tokens

triage-issue

Analyze a GitHub issue, verify claims against the codebase, and close invalid issues with a technical response.

aden-hive/hive · 0 tokens

bug-triage

Read all open bugs in production/qa/bugs/, re-evaluate priority vs. severity, assign to sprints, surface systemic trends, and produce a triage report. Run at sprint start or when the bug count grows enough to need re-prioritization.

Donchitos/Claude-Code-Game-Studios · 59 tokens

review-loop

Run the adversarial verification loop — implement, then hand the change to a fresh checker that did not write it, fix what it finds, and re-dispatch until APPROVE. Use before claiming any behavioural change is done, and on requests like "review loop", "adversarial review", "independent review", "get this verified"…

sangrokjung/claude-forge · 100 tokens