things-todo

A command-line tool for managing tasks in Things 3, a task-management app for Apple devices.

In plain words
What is it for?
Adding, listing, searching, updating, deleting, and verifying Things 3 tasks.
Why use it?
It lets scripts and coding agents work with Things tasks without editing the app's database directly.

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/steipete/agent-scripts/things-todo
Any agent
npx skills add steipete/agent-scripts --skill things-todo
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/steipete/agent-scripts

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 23 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 743 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 $0.00023 $0.00743
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00371
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00149
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00074

Measured 2d ago against content hash a0e7d04daabc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

things-todo 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/things-todo/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Things Todo

Use this for Things 3 tasks on Peter's Macs. Prefer things for Things-backed todos; use $reminders only when the user asks for Apple Reminders.

Tool

  • CLI: things
  • Repo: https://github.com/ossianhempel/things3-cli
  • Install:
GOBIN=/opt/homebrew/bin go install github.com/ossianhempel/things3-cli/cmd/things@latest

Auth for update URL operations:

source ~/.profile >/dev/null 2>&1 || true
things auth

THINGS_AUTH_TOKEN should come from ~/.profile or 1Password. Never print it. things update --dry-run must redact it as auth-token=***.

Start

Use JSON for scripted reads and verification:

things tasks --format json --limit 20
things today --format json
things search "query" --format json

Things DB reads may need Full Disk Access for the calling app. Writes should go through Things URL Scheme or AppleScript via things; do not write the SQLite DB directly.

Add

Default: add, then search/read back.

things add "Book LHR-SFO nonstop business flight" --notes "Nonstop only." --when tomorrow --tags travel
things tasks --search "LHR-SFO" --format json

Useful flags:

  • --notes "text"
  • --when today|tomorrow|evening|anytime|someday|YYYY-MM-DD
  • --deadline YYYY-MM-DD
  • --list "Project or Area"
  • --tags tag1,tag2
  • --checklist-item "text" repeatable
  • --dry-run to inspect the things:/// URL without mutating.

Update / Delete

Find the UUID first, then mutate by id:

things tasks --search "flight" --format json
things update --id <uuid> "New title" --notes "Updated notes"
things tasks --search "New title" --format json
things delete --id <uuid> --confirm <uuid>
things tasks --search "New title" --format json
things trash --search "New title" --format json

Always read back after writes. Delete moves items to Things Trash; verify normal search is empty and trash search contains the item when cleanup matters.

Conventions

  • Turn vague asks into concrete next-action titles.
  • Preserve wording when the user clearly wants capture, not rewriting.
  • Split unrelated actions into separate to-dos.
  • Use Today only when the user implies it; otherwise use Inbox/Anytime defaults.
  • Prefer --dry-run before bulk updates/deletes.
  • For current date math, run date; do not guess.

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 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 · 97 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A a0e7d04daabc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

things-todo is a skill published in the GitHub repository steipete/agent-scripts (6,590 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 743 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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