Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to travisennis/acai. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/travisennis/acai/master/.agents/skills/grooming-backlog/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/travisennis/acaiWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/travisennis/acai/grooming-backlog)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/travisennis/acai/grooming-backlog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/travisennis/acai/grooming-backlog/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/travisennis/acai/grooming-backlog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/travisennis/acai/grooming-backlog.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00050 | $0.01134 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00454 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00227 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00113 |
Grade A, and why
grooming-backlog 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 2mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Grooming Backlog
Use this skill when the backlog needs a grooming pass. Grooming moves tasks from ambiguous, underspecified, or stale states into a ready state where an agent can pick them up and work them without needing additional decisions or clarification.
Goals
- Every Open task is either Pending (ready to work), Blocked (blocker documented), or has a clear next action.
- Every Pending task has all product and design decisions recorded.
- Every Blocked task documents what it is blocked on and what would unblock it.
- Dependencies (
depends_onandexec_planfields) are accurate and complete. - Task files are self-contained — no open questions in the body or comments.
- Generated indexes are regenerated via
ahm index.
When to groom
- Before a sprint or work cycle planning.
- When the backlog has accumulated stale Open or Blocked tasks.
- After a block of implementation work (to rebalance the queue).
- Any time an agent reports a task is too vague to work.
Workflow
1. Inspect the queue
# Quick ready queue
ahm task ready
# Active tasks not ready
ahm task blocked
ahm task list --status Open
# Label vocabulary and counts
ahm task labels
If ahm is unavailable, read .agents/.tasks/index.md as the fallback queue
artifact and inspect the relevant files under .agents/.tasks/active/.
2. For each task that is not Completed or Cancelled, audit:
Front matter invariants:
statusis one of:Open,Pending,In Progress,Blocked,Tracking.priorityis set and uses the project's priority scale.effortis set and uses the project's effort scale.labelsinclude at least onetype:*and onearea:*label.depends_onreferences real task IDs. A task only depends on another if the dependency is genuinely blocking — not just "related to."exec_planreferences an existing ExecPlan file when the task isLorXL, or documents that no plan is needed (-).
Decision completeness:
- If the Summary or Fix Direction presents alternatives (e.g., "use X or Y"), record which alternative was chosen and why. If none is chosen yet, flag the task as Blocked and document what decision is needed.
- If the task references external inputs (issues, design docs, conversations) that have since been resolved, capture the resolution in the task body.
- If the task is an
LorXLwithout an ExecPlan, flag it.
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.
- 2mo ago First seen · 125 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A cc03e3ce68db
grooming-backlog is a skill published in the GitHub repository travisennis/acai (5 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 1,134 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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