refine-issue

refine-issue is a skill for Claude Code from sleeyax/promptfiles. It costs 55 tokens per session (1,450 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for turning a GitHub or GitLab issue into a detailed brief that an AI coding assistant can implement.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to clarify thin or incomplete issues before coding, then optionally update the issue with the resulting brief.
Why use it?
It fills in missing requirements by checking the issue against the codebase and asking the user about unclear points.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: $ARGUMENTS substitution. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Codex.

Part of the sleeyax-skills plugin — 17 skills, 2 agents shipped together

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/sleeyax/promptfiles/refine-issue
Any agent
npx skills add sleeyax/promptfiles --skill refine-issue
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sleeyax/promptfiles

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install sleeyax-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills, 2 agents.

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 refine-issue

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sleeyax/promptfiles/refine-issue.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sleeyax/promptfiles/refine-issue)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sleeyax/promptfiles/refine-issue"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sleeyax/promptfiles/refine-issue.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,450 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 5.1 $0.00055 $0.01450
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00725
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00290
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00145

Measured 5d ago against content hash d15f3884d9e9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

refine-issue 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 5d 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/planning/refine-issue/SKILL.md · 114 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 114 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Refine Issue

Issue: $ARGUMENTS

Turn a thin issue into a spec an agent can implement from. Example invocations: /refine-issue #12, /refine-issue 12, /refine-issue <issue-url>.

Hard rules

  • Read-only against the code: no source edits, no commits, no test runs, no repro commands. The only writes are the comment or issue update the user picks at step 6, and — where domain modeling is set up — the glossary and ADR files described in step 3.
  • Never post to, edit, or close anything on the tracker without an explicit confirm at step 6. Never close an issue at all.
  • Every gate is a real stop: ask, then wait for the answer. Use the AskUserQuestion tool when it's available in the session; where it isn't (e.g. Codex), ask in plain text with the same numbered options and stop until the user replies. Never assume an answer.
  • Don't invent requirements. Anything you can't answer from the issue, its comments, or the codebase is a question for the user, not a guess.

Workflow

1. Resolve the issue

Parse $ARGUMENTS:

  • Bare number (strip a leading #) → that issue in the current repo.
  • Full URL → parse host, project path, and number from it.
  • Empty → ask the user for an issue number or URL before proceeding.

Determine the provider from git remote -v:

  • Contains github.comGitHub
  • Contains gitlab.com or a self-hosted GitLab host → GitLab
  • Otherwise ask the user which provider to use.

Extract the owner/repo (GitHub) or group/project (GitLab) path too — you'll need it to fetch.

Print the resolved issue (number, title, URL) before doing anything else, so the user can catch a wrong target early. If the issue is closed, ask whether to continue before going further.

2. Fetch it

Prefer the matching MCP server if one is available in the current session; otherwise use the CLI:

  • GitHub: gh issue view <number> --json title,body,labels,state,comments,url
  • GitLab: glab issue view <number> --comments

If neither MCP nor CLI is available, stop and tell the user what to install.

Read the full file on GitHub · 114 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. 5d ago First seen · 114 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A d15f3884d9e9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

refine-issue is a skill published in the GitHub repository sleeyax/promptfiles (2 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,450 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 2026-08-31.

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