skill-work-slicing

skill-work-slicing is a skill for Claude Code from nyldn/claude-octopus. It costs 33 tokens per session (1,291 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for splitting an agreed plan or specification into small, complete work items, each showing what it depends on.

In plain words
What is it for?
Turning plans into trackable tickets for work across project layers or among multiple developers.
Why use it?
It makes large pieces of work easier to assign and prevents tasks from being started before their prerequisites are ready.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Part of the octo plugin — 70 skills, 106 commands, 10 agents, 18 hooks shipped together

Good fit Turning plans into trackable tickets for work across project layers or among multiple developers.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-work-slicing
About the project

Claude Octopus is an orchestration project that sends research, design, and coding tasks to Claude Code and other AI model providers so their results can be compared. Developers use it for multi-model work, disagreement detection, reviews, persistent context, and an optional workflow that moves from discovery through delivery. The catalogue entries are its commands, skills, agents, instructions, hooks, plugins, and settings.

nyldn/claude-octopus · 4,058 stars · on GitHub · reddit.com

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 nyldn/claude-octopus --skill skill-work-slicing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nyldn/claude-octopus

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install octo, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 70 skills, 106 commands, 10 agents, 18 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 skill-work-slicing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-work-slicing/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-work-slicing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-work-slicing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-work-slicing/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for skill-work-slicing

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-work-slicing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nyldn/claude-octopus/skill-work-slicing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,291 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 $0.00033 $0.01291
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00646
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00258
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00129

Measured 2d ago against content hash 056b0deb3890, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-work-slicing 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.

.claude/skills/skill-work-slicing/SKILL.md · 135 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 135 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Work Slicing

Turn a plan, spec, or the conversation so far into a set of tickets. Each one is a vertical slice — a narrow but complete path through every layer — and each declares the tickets that block it.

This is the step between "we know what we are building" and "someone can pick up a piece of it". It does not decide anything: if decisions are still open, run skill-pressure-test first.

Before slicing, map unresolved decision records and their dependencies. Each record names its question, required evidence, owner, resolution, and unblocked implementation. A dependency cycle withholds ready status until it is recut. Invalidated decisions reopen affected work rather than leaving stale completion.

Adapted from to-tickets in mattpocock/skills (MIT), retargeted at this repo's trackers.

When To Use

  • A plan or spec exists and needs cutting into fileable work.
  • A tracking epic is too big to claim and needs children.
  • Several people or sessions will work in parallel and need boundaries.

When Not To Use

  • Decisions are still open. Slicing unresolved work produces tickets that get reopened. Use skill-pressure-test.
  • The work fits one session. File one ticket, or none.
  • You want parallel execution across agents right now, with worktrees and waves. That is /octo:parallel, which decomposes into work packages it then runs. This produces tracker state for humans and future sessions.

Inputs

The plan, spec, or conversation. Optionally a parent epic id to hang the slices under.

Workflow

1. Slice vertically

Each slice cuts a narrow but complete path through every layer it touches — schema, API, UI, tests. It is not a horizontal slice of one layer.

  • A completed slice is demoable or verifiable on its own.
  • Each is sized to fit one fresh context window.
  • "Add the database columns" is horizontal and untestable alone. "Store and display the user's timezone, end to end" is vertical.

Read the full file on GitHub · 135 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 · +10 lines 056b0deb3890
  2. 6d ago First seen · 125 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 073689239d66

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-work-slicing is a skill published in the GitHub repository nyldn/claude-octopus (4,058 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,291 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 2026-09-03.

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