backlog order

Backlog management often falls apart when issue titles are vague or technical dependencies are misunderstood. Manually tracking what blocks what leads to merge conflicts and broken builds when tasks are started out of order. This skill analyzes your GitHub issues alongside your actual source code to establish a technically sound build order.

What it does

• Dependency Mapping identifies real technical blockers by analyzing imports, function calls, and logic in the codebase.
• Backlog Scanning audits open issues to find missing links or outdated dependencies that no longer apply.
• Native Integration writes relationships directly to GitHub using official "blocked by" links or issue body references.
• Cycle Prevention checks for circular dependencies before proposing any changes to prevent logical deadlocks.
• Multi-Issue Chaining sequences groups of issues into a logical path based on technical prerequisites.

How it works

1. Identify issues by providing specific issue numbers to place or chain, or request a full backlog scan.
2. Analyze code to verify if issue A genuinely requires the changes in issue B before it can be implemented.
3. Review proposal of a numbered list of links with one-line technical rationales for each dependency.
4. Authorize writes to update GitHub via the CLI once you have verified the proposed build order.

Frameworks & tools

This tool requires a local git checkout, the GitHub CLI (gh), and an authenticated session. It interacts with the GitHub REST API to manage issue dependencies.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic prompts rely on issue titles, which are often misleading or outdated. This skill grounds its logic in your actual code and git log to ensure dependencies are functional, not just thematic, while handling the heavy lifting of API calls and cycle detection.

Use cases

• Sequencing a feature by chaining several related issues into a logical implementation order.
• Onboarding to a backlog by scanning for blockers to identify which tasks are truly "ready to start."
• Resolving bottlenecks by finding all issues that are currently blocking a high-priority milestone.

Known limitations

Requires a local repository checkout and GitHub CLI authentication. If the GitHub repository does not support native dependency links, it falls back to issue body text references.

One of five backlog skills that work together: suggest, order, next, keeper, cleanup. From the maker of Sideboard, a live GitHub Issues board for Claude Code.