rave-altfred

Claude Backlog Skill — Documentation skill for Claude Code

Documentation community

Claude Code skill: a plain-Markdown task backlog (docs/backlog.md) driven by /backlog, with a small Python script doing every edit.

How to install Claude Backlog Skill

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open rave-altfred/claude-backlog-skill and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Claude Backlog Skill does

Claude Code skill: a plain-Markdown task backlog (docs/backlog.md) driven by /backlog, with a small Python script doing every edit.

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README

/backlog — a plain-Markdown task backlog for Claude Code

A [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) skill that keeps a project's task list in one file, `docs/backlog.md`, and lets you drive it with a slash command:

/backlog next
/backlog add Dark mode; Location search. Type a city name.
/backlog start W-004
/backlog done W-004 Search uses the geocoding API.

The backlog stays a readable Markdown file that lives in your repo next to the code. You can edit it by hand, diff it, and review it in pull requests. The skill makes sure Claude edits it the same careful way every time.

Why a script and not just a prompt

Asking a model to "move B-042 to Done" usually means it re-types the whole line, and long lines come back slightly changed. Here every edit goes through `backlog.py`, a small standard-library Python script that:

moves and re-marks lines without retyping them,
hands out IDs from the footer and never reuses an ID already in the file,
keeps the Now section in step (start adds a pointer, done and drop remove it),
refuses to guess: an ambiguous ID, text, or section name stops with a list of matches.

Claude only decides *what* to do; the script does the editing. That is also why the skill can run on Haiku (`model: haiku` in `SKILL.md`), so it is fast and cheap.

Install

Clone the repo into your personal skills folder:

git clone https://github.com/rave-altfred/claude-backlog-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/backlog

Start a new Claude Code session and type `/backlog`. To update later:

git -C ~/.claude/skills/backlog pull

The folder must be named `backlog` and sit at `~/.claude/skills/backlog`, because `SKILL.md` calls the script by that path.

Requirements

Python 3.9 or newer (python3 on your PATH). No packages to install.
macOS or Linux. The script uses fcntl file locking, so it does not run on native Windows (WSL works).
git is optional. The script uses it to find the repo root; without git it