Auto (Autonomous Backlog Iteration) Agent Skill

Autonomous Linear-backlog iteration — ships exactly ONE issue per invocation (preflight → /next specified → /full auto wt → record…

Context cost
24.6k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 98.3 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
MITthe author’s own terms
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Autonomous Linear-backlog iteration — ships exactly ONE issue per invocation (preflight → /next specified → /full auto wt → record outcome), with a skip-and-circuit-breaker failure policy. Accepts an optional issue ID (`/auto BF-123`) for targeted mode — skip the pick and ship that specific certified issue unattended — and an `epic:<ID>` token (`/auto epic:BF-1826`, what `/fleet-launch epic:<ID>` dispatches) that scopes every pick to that epic's graph, and a `backlog` token (what `/fleet-launch backlog` dispatches) that lets a pick fall through to Backlog once nothing Planned/Todo is…

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

linearproductivity

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md98.3 kB · preview
--- name: auto ---
6# Auto (Autonomous Backlog Iteration)
7
8Ships **exactly one Linear issue per invocation**, end-to-end and unattended: finish any in-flight work, pick the best next issue via /next specified (certified issues only) — or, in **targeted mode** (/auto BF-123), take the issue named in the invocation — ship it via /full auto wt, record the outcome, emit a tagged final line. Continuous operation is /loop /auto — each loop iteration is one issue, and the loop ends itself when the backlog drains (NO-CANDIDATES) or the circuit breaker trips (AUTO-HALTED).
9
10**Why one-issue-per-invocation instead of an internal "keep going" loop:** in-prose anti-stop scaffolding is the documented failure mode of autonomous macros (/full records it failing three times before its Stop hook existed). /loop's wakeup machinery is the reliable recurrence mechanism; the full-continue.sh Stop hook guards the intra-issue start→finish handoff, and the auto-heartbeat.sh Stop hook guards the loop heartbeat the same way — added after prose failed a third time (BF-701, BF-665, BF-695). This skill keeps its reliability in those hooks and in /loop's machinery, not in prose scaffolding — it composes the enforced pieces.
11
12**Why worktree mode is not optional:** in-place mode would leave the checkout on issue N's branch, and /start's "already on a non-main branch → stay on it" rule would stack issue N+1 onto it — every subsequent issue cascading onto the first issue's branch. wt mode forks each issue from the source branch and /finish merge folds it back, so successive issues chain correctly (each fork sees the prior merges) with no stacking. /auto therefore ALWAYS dispatches wt.
13
14## Authorization — read this first
15
16**Invoking /auto (directly or via /loop /auto) is the explicit, run-scoped standing grant for commits and pushes.** standards/git.md forbids treating "commit" or "push" as a session-wide grant; /auto is the single named exception, because unattended issue-shipping is its entire documented contract. The grant covers exactly: the /finish auto commit+push of each issue this run ships. It does not cover force-pushes, history rewrites, or committing work that cannot be attributed to a Linear issue (see Preflight). Every shipped change is audited via the plan comment (/start auto Step 7) and completion comment (/finish Step 4) on its Linear issue.
17
18## Unattended-run prerequisites
19
20This skill cannot change permission modes or pick its own model. For a genuinely walk-away run:
21
22- **Launch with --model opus[1m] --effort xhigh, and no --autocompact.** Do NOT use opusplan: it means "Opus in plan mode, Sonnet otherwise", and Step 3's /full auto dispatches /start auto, which skips EnterPlanMode entirely (/start Step 6). The Opus branch never fires, so an opusplan run executes end-to-end on Sonnet. [1m] gives one oversized issue headroom. Cross-iteration accumulation was the dominant fleet cost — on opus[1m] the default compaction threshold sits near the 1M window, so a looping session never compacted on its own, and the 2026-08-13/14 fleets processed 91% of their billable volume at >200k context (cache reads scale linearly with context — this is what let 3 sessions exhaust a 5h window that 9 leaner sessions survived). Since 2026-10-09 the loop-boundary mod (~/.claude/mods/loop-boundary, installed by update.sh) resets it: when a looping session's turn ends with one of this skill's outcome lines, the mod compacts the conversation to one boundary message, so every iteration starts at the session floor; cross-iteration state lives in tmp/auto-state-*.json and Linear, so nothing is lost. The --autocompact 500000 dispatch cap that answered the same cost from 2026-08-15 is retired — it compacted at a size threshold wherever the session was, routinely mid-review (300k orbited: 9 compacts in 36 min; history in doc/compacting-investigation.md) — and fleet-launch/fleet-sequence refuse to dispatch on a machine where the mod is not enabled. Never resume a deep fleet session; recover in-flight issues via fresh targeted /auto BF-XXX sessions. Stop the halted session in claude agents before launching that run: a session the harness halted (an autocompact thrash leaves it blocked, not dead) still reads alive, so the targeted run's create gate refuses its worktree. After the stop, run ~/.claude/scripts/wt-owner.sh <worktree>. dead or released needs nothing more — the targeted run adopts the worktree, commits and uncommitted work included. alive or unknown there comes from the stamp's pid, since a stop can remove the session's job dir and a fleet stamp's pid is the shared daemon or blank; release it with ~/.claude/scripts/wt-disown.sh --force <worktree>, which is correct here only because you just stopped the owner. The targeted run never forces on its own. Fable 5 (--model fable) is the alternative for unusually large issues — better long-horizon retention — but it runs safety classifiers that can return stop_reason: "refusal", which reaches Step 4 as an unrecognized-tag failure and counts against the circuit breaker.
23- Run the session in a permissive mode; consider /fewer-permission-prompts first to seed a project allowlist. **Interactive** sessions (a watched terminal/VSCode): auto-accept edits or claude --permission-mode acceptEdits suffice — someone can answer the occasional Bash prompt. **Background** sessions (claude --bg, /fleet-launch): use --permission-mode auto — acceptEdits only auto-accepts file edits, so the first gated Bash command (observed: /start wt's worktree validation) stalls the session at a prompt nobody can see, before its first pick.
24- A permission prompt mid-run does not break anything — the run pauses until answered and /loop resumes normally. Expect occasional prompts on milestones that touch unusual commands (e.g., native-bridge/hardware work).
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md15,043 words
Files1
LicenceMIT
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈240
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
24,335
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
12.3%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would not fit in the window together.
050k100k150k200k context window

24.6k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 98.3 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md98.3 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing. The MIT licence covers the templates and examples as well as the instructions.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Auto (Autonomous Backlog Iteration) · 24.6k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration ] || { mv .claude/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add alienfast/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as auto in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencealienfast/auto-autonomous-backlog-iteration

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

Reviews

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Who wrote it

AL
alienfast

Publishes on mcprush.

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