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Skillsheet

loop-triage

loop-triage

Produces a clean, prioritized list of actionable work for an autonomous loop from CI failures, open issues, recent commits, and chat threads. Use when a development loop needs to decide what to work on next, when backlog noise exceeds signal, or at the start of each loop cycle.

Category
Category: loop-engineering
  • triage
  • prioritization
  • backlog
  • ci-failures
  • loop-cycle

Install this skill

npx . --tool claude-code --only loop-triage

Run from a git checkout of this repo — see the README for details.

When to apply

Run at the start of every loop cycle, or whenever the volume of candidate work (CI failures, issues, review comments, alerts) exceeds what the loop can act on. Triage converts noise into a ranked, actionable list.

Inputs

  • Recent CI/test failures (last 24h)
  • Open issues or tickets assigned to the team
  • Recent commits on main (last 24–48h)
  • Chat threads the loop can see
  • The loop's current state file (what it already knows/attempted)

Workflow

  1. Collect — Gather every candidate item from all sources into one flat list. Do not filter yet.
  2. Deduplicate — Collapse repeats: the same failure across jobs, an issue and its chat discussion, a flaky test re-failing.
  3. Classify — Tag each item:
    • bug — broken behavior; production impact unknown
    • flaky — passes on retry; quarantine, don't chase
    • chore — deps, cleanup, docs; no behavior change
    • feature — new capability; needs design before code
  4. Rank by: production impact > blocked others > recurrence count > age. Within ties, prefer smallest diff.
  5. Filter by capability — Drop items the loop cannot safely do autonomously (auth, payments, schema migrations, anything on the denylist) into a "needs human" bucket instead.
  6. Emit the report.

Output format

# Triage <date>

## Act now (loop-ownable)
1. [bug] <item> — evidence, suggested first step, risk
2. ...

## Needs human
- <item> — why (denylist/risk/ambiguity)

## Snoozed
- <item> — reason (flaky, waiting on upstream, duplicate of #N)

Rules

  • Every "act now" item needs evidence (a failing run URL, issue link, quoted error) — no vibes-based entries.
  • Cap the act-now list at what one cycle can finish; overflow goes back to the pool, not to "urgent".
  • Record triage output in the loop's state file so the next cycle doesn't re-derive it.

Related skills

  • loop-budget — Decides how many of the triaged items this cycle can afford.
  • minimal-fix — The execution style for each triaged bug.