next-issue

A workflow skill for choosing and implementing the next open GitHub issue in an active milestone. A milestone is a group of related project tasks tracked together.

In plain words
What is it for?
Picking one issue, creating or reusing the right feature branch, making the code changes, running tests, and committing the result.
Why use it?
It removes the need to manually find the next ticket, choose a branch, and remember the project’s implementation and testing steps.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/stefan-jansen/coding-agent-toolkit/next-issue
Any agent
npx skills add stefan-jansen/coding-agent-toolkit --skill next-issue
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stefan-jansen/coding-agent-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 83 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,237 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 $0.00083 $0.02237
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.01118
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00447
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00224

Measured 2d ago against content hash 20dac53b277a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

next-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 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.

skills/next-issue/SKILL.md · 220 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 220 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

next-issue — implement the next open issue in the milestone

You are running the NEXT-ISSUE step of the workflow. Your job is to take ONE open GitHub issue (the next in line for the active milestone) and ship the implementation as commits on a feature branch, so that the PR for the milestone moves forward by exactly one issue.

This step is host-neutral: same contract on Claude and Codex. The verbs are gh, git, and whatever the project's test runner is (uv run pytest, npm test, etc.).

Arguments

Parse these from the user's invocation (any order):

Arg Required Default Meaning
--repo <owner/name> no current repo via gh repo view --json nameWithOwner Target GitHub repo
--milestone <title> no the most recently active milestone with open issues Restrict picking to this milestone
--issue <N> no lowest-numbered open issue in milestone Explicitly target one
--branch <name> no reuse current branch if it matches the milestone's PR; otherwise feat/<milestone-slug> Feature branch name
--dry-run no false (act) Print what would happen, change nothing

Default behavior is to act, not dry-run — implementing code is the point of the verb. --dry-run is for "show me what's next" without starting work.

Unlike /plan-issues, next-issue mutates the working tree by design. Use --dry-run to preview the pick without touching code.

What "active milestone" means

If --milestone is not given, resolve it like this:

  1. List open milestones in the repo: gh api "repos/<owner>/<repo>/milestones?state=open" --jq '.[].title'
  2. If exactly one is open → pick it.
  3. If multiple → ask the user, listing them with their open-issue count from gh issue list --milestone "<title>" --state open --json number.
  4. If zero → tell the user there's nothing to pick up and stop. Suggest /plan-issues or a new milestone.

What "next issue" means

Lowest-numbered open issue in the chosen milestone:

Read the full file on GitHub · 220 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 First seen · 220 lines · 83 tokens per session scan A 20dac53b277a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

next-issue is a skill published in the GitHub repository stefan-jansen/coding-agent-toolkit (22 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 2,237 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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