spec-spine: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/next/SKILL.md

next is a skill for Claude Code from statecrafting/spec-spine. It costs 40 tokens per session (822 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A read-only work-order helper that chooses the next approved project specification from a dependency list. It separates work that is ready, blocked by dependencies, awaiting human approval, or already in progress.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps inspect the specification registry, identify the next eligible item, and report dependency cycles and other blockers.
Why use it?
A backlog can contain unfinished, unapproved, or conflicting work, making it unsafe to choose the next task by guesswork.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions AGENTS.md.

This is statecrafting/spec-spine's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on spec-spine itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything spec-spine configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to statecrafting/spec-spine. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/statecrafting/spec-spine/main/.claude/skills/next/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/statecrafting/spec-spine

Made for: Claude Code.

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 next

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/next/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/next)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/next"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/next/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 next

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/next"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/statecrafting/spec-spine/next.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 822 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.
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 $0.00040 $0.00822
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00411
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00164
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00082

Measured yesterday against content hash 6bd284099b2e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

next 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 yesterday.

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/next/SKILL.md · 90 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 90 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/next: the next work order

The backlog is the spec corpus. Step 1 of AGENTS.md "Working the backlog" picks the spec, and this skill computes that pick from typed reads. Two rules sit on top of what the tool reports:

  • Approval is a human act. spec-spine registry plan (spec 038) schedules by implementation and depends_on; it will offer a status: draft spec whose dependencies are met. A draft is never a work order: drop it from the ready set and list it as "awaiting approval".
  • One session, one spec. A spec at implementation: in-progress is in flight (spec 044): it belongs to another session or to an interrupted one. Report it separately; never offer it as new work unless a human names it.

Step 1: the ready set, typed

spec-spine registry plan --json

Exit 0 prints {"ready": [...ids in dependency order...], "blocked": [{"id", "blockedBy": [{"id", "state"}]}]}. A non-zero exit is a halt: V-014 names a dependency cycle (schedule nothing from a broken graph; print the diagnostic verbatim), and any other failure means the registry is unreadable (/setup, or a stale binary).

Parsing this output is a typed read (.claude/rules/governed-artifact-reads.md). Reading .derived/ is not.

Step 2: apply the two rules

For each ready id, read its record:

spec-spine registry show <id> --json
  • status is not approved: move it to "awaiting approval".
  • implementation is in-progress: move it to "in flight".
  • Otherwise it is a work order. Keep the tool's order.

Record specs (the bootstrap, a thesis, a harness spec at n-a or complete) never appear in ready; if one does, its implementation is wrong and that is a finding, not a pick.

Step 3: the pick, cross-checked

Take the first work order unless a human named another. Read its ## Territory (or equivalent) for an operator prerequisite (a service, a credential, a sibling repository) that is missing: that is a stop at step 1 of the protocol, reported exactly, not mocked around.

Read the full file on GitHub · 90 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. yesterday First seen · 90 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A 6bd284099b2e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

next is a skill published in the GitHub repository statecrafting/spec-spine (10 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 822 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 2026-09-07.

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