to-issues

to-issues is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from smallnest/goal-workflow. It costs 96 tokens per session (3,279 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning aid that breaks a PRD or technical specification into small implementation issues, each covering a complete, demonstrable piece of work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create agent-ready tickets for GitHub or a local tracker, with acceptance criteria and dependency links. A vertical slice means one narrow behaviour working through all needed layers, rather than separating database, API, and interface work.
Why use it?
It prevents large requirements from becoming vague tickets and records which issues genuinely block others.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the goal-workflow plugin — 19 skills 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/smallnest/goal-workflow/to-issues
Any agent
npx skills add smallnest/goal-workflow --skill to-issues
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/smallnest/goal-workflow

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install goal-workflow, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 19 skills.

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 to-issues

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/smallnest/goal-workflow/to-issues.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/smallnest/goal-workflow/to-issues)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/smallnest/goal-workflow/to-issues"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/smallnest/goal-workflow/to-issues.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,279 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 $0.00096 $0.03279
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.01639
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00656
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00328

Measured 5d ago against content hash e556f4a8c971, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

to-issues 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/to-issues/SKILL.md · 283 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 283 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

to-issues — PRD/SPEC to Issues

Decompose a PRD and/or technical SPEC into small, independently demoable Issues, each sized to fit a single fresh context window, then create them in your chosen platform. Works standalone — you don't need to have run /prd first.

Every Issue this skill produces is agent-ready by construction: a fresh session that has never seen your PRD/SPEC can pick it up and finish it.


Core principle: tracer bullets, not layers

This is the rule that matters most, and the one models break most often.

  • A horizontal slice ships one layer of the change (all the schema in one ticket, all the API in another, all the UI in a third). Nothing works until every layer lands, and each ticket's acceptance criteria have to reach into work another ticket owns. This is the default the model falls into — avoid it.
  • A vertical slice — the tracer bullet — ships one thin but complete path through every layer at once (schema + API + UI + tests for a single narrow behaviour). It is verifiable alone the moment it lands, and it owns everything it grades.

The test for every Issue: "What can I demo when this is done?" If the answer is a layer ("the database has a priority column") rather than a behaviour ("a user can set a task's priority and see it persist"), it is a horizontal slice — re-slice it.

Sizing floor: if the whole change fits in one context window, you don't need Issues at all. Say so and point the user straight at /goal.

Keep this skill in the same context window as /prd-to-spec. Don't clear or compact between them, or the SPEC has to be re-fetched and may truncate.


The Job

  1. Locate input — find a PRD or SPEC file (auto-detect or user-specified)
  2. Find prefactoring — surface "make the change easy, then make the easy change" work and order it first
  3. Decompose into vertical Issues — break behaviour into tracer-bullet tickets with blocking edges
  4. Quiz the user — present the numbered list and push on granularity, edges, and demo paths before publishing
  5. Choose platform — GitHub / Local
  6. Create Issues — blockers first, with native blocking links, then print summary

Read the full file on GitHub · 283 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 · 283 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A e556f4a8c971

Subscribe to this mod's changes

to-issues is a skill published in the GitHub repository smallnest/goal-workflow (274 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 3,279 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.

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