backlog-groomer

backlog-groomer is a skill for Claude Code from voxpelli/claude-beads. It costs 191 tokens per session (3,775 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for reviewing and managing a project's beads backlog. A backlog is the list of open work items, bugs, and research tasks.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for triaging open issues, reprioritizing work, closing obsolete items, researching topics, and creating or enriching issues.
Why use it?
It helps organize, prioritize, investigate, and update issues while requiring approval before changes are made.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the vp-beads plugin — 8 skills, 1 agent, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit It is for triaging open issues, reprioritizing work, closing obsolete items, researching topics, and creating or enriching issues.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/voxpelli/claude-beads/backlog-groomer
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.

Any agent
npx skills add voxpelli/claude-beads --skill backlog-groomer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/voxpelli/claude-beads

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install vp-beads, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 1 agent, 3 hooks.

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 backlog-groomer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/voxpelli/claude-beads/backlog-groomer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/voxpelli/claude-beads/backlog-groomer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/voxpelli/claude-beads/backlog-groomer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/voxpelli/claude-beads/backlog-groomer/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 backlog-groomer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/voxpelli/claude-beads/backlog-groomer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/voxpelli/claude-beads/backlog-groomer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 191 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,775 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 $0.00191 $0.03775
Opus 5 $0.00096 $0.01887
Sonnet 5 $0.00038 $0.00755
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00378

Measured 10d ago against content hash 2b3e06db98d5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

backlog-groomer 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 10d 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/backlog-groomer/SKILL.md · 299 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 299 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Backlog Groomer

Triage, prioritize, and research work tracked in the beads issue tracker. This skill operates on the bd CLI — all mutations (create, close, update) require explicit user approval before execution.

Determine which workflow the user needs based on their request. If ambiguous, default to workflow 1 (review and triage) for grooming requests, or workflow 4 (Investigate topic as spike) for research requests.

Issue Types Reference

Beads v1.0+ defines nine core issue types. Pick the type that matches the shape of the work, not just its size. The validation.on-create=error gate enforces required markdown sections per type — a bd create will fail if the required sections are missing.

Type Required markdown sections When to use
task none General work item (default)
bug ## Steps to Reproduce, ## Acceptance Criteria Defect — behavior diverges from intended
feature ## Acceptance Criteria New system capability (system-centric framing)
chore none Maintenance / housekeeping with no user-visible behavior change
epic ## Success Criteria Large body of work that decomposes into child issues
decision ## Decision, ## Rationale, ## Alternatives Considered Architecture decision record (ADR) — outcome of deliberation
spike ## Goal, ## Findings Timeboxed investigation that reduces uncertainty before a story
story ## Acceptance Criteria User-centric framing of a feature ("As a X, I want Y...")
milestone none Structural marker; contains no work itself

Read the full file on GitHub · 299 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 10d ago First seen · 299 lines · 191 tokens per session scan A 2b3e06db98d5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

backlog-groomer is a skill published in the GitHub repository voxpelli/claude-beads (2 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 191 tokens to every session and 3,775 once invoked, about $0.0010 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 2026-08-31.

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