| name | triage-task |
| description | Score an issue or the whole available-work queue on priority, value, and token cost to recommend do-now/good-ROI/defer/skip. Advisory only — never claims, relabels, or reorders anything. |
Triage Task
An advisory rubric for deciding what's worth an agent's time. This skill
never mutates repo state — no labels, no assignees, no comments. It
only produces a recommendation for a human or another agent to act on.
Inputs
gh issue list --label "status: available" --state open --json number,title,labels,body
gh issue list --label "status: changes-requested" --assignee "@me" --state open --json number,title,labels
Scoring
For each issue, score three axes:
Priority (1-5). Read from the priority: label if present, otherwise
estimate from urgency described in the issue body. priority: high should
generally dominate the final verdict regardless of the other two axes.
Value (composite). Consider:
- Impact if this ships (how many users/workflows does it affect?)
- Leverage (does it unblock other queued work, or is it a dead end?)
- Novelty (is this duplicate/overlapping with another open issue or a
recently merged PR? Check before scoring — duplicated effort is zero
value regardless of how good the individual PR is.)
- Tractability (is the ask well-specified enough to execute without a lot
of back-and-forth, or is it actually a research/discovery task in
disguise?)
Token-cost band (S/M/L/XL). Rough estimate of how much agent context
and how many turns this will take: S = single-file, well-specified fix.
M = a few files, some design judgment. L = cross-cutting change or
non-trivial investigation. XL = probably needs to be broken into smaller
issues before anyone should pick it up — flag this in your output rather
than triaging it as-is.
Verdict
Combine into one of:
- 🟢 Do now — high priority or high value, tractable, reasonable cost.
- 🔵 Good ROI — solid value relative to cost, not urgent.
- 🟡 Defer — low urgency, or value is unclear until something else
lands first.
- 🔴 Skip — duplicate, out of scope, or cost (XL, ill-specified) far
exceeds likely value as currently written — recommend the issue be
split or clarified instead of worked on directly.
Output format
A short table: issue number, one-line title, priority, value note, cost
band, verdict. End with your top 1-3 recommendations for what to actually
work on next, and a one-line reason for each.
What this skill must never do
- Never call
gh issue edit, add/remove labels, change assignees, or
comment on issues as a side effect of triage.
- Never claim work on the triager's behalf — that's
start_work.sh's job,
driven by the queue order in AGENTS.md, not by this skill's opinion.
